The J-Music Advance Party (May 2024)

May these releases bring us joy.

Why, hello there! Happy to see you could make it to this month’s J-Music Advance Party! If you’re one of our regular Party goers you’d know where to go from here, but if by chance this is your first time attending one of these events, please allow me a few minutes of your time to explain ー

What is The J-Music Advance Party?

The J-Music Advance Party is a monthly publication where I quite simply talk about bands and artists that I personally plan on listening to this month (and subsequently recommend that you too as well) in advance of their upcoming albums and releases in the style of a an album “pre”-launch party of sorts.

These could be bands who have an album coming out that I’m excited for, or they could also be an artist whose discography I feel warrants further exploring starting with their new EP. Whatever the case may be, these are releases that I’m both looking forward to and that I hope to put on your guys’ radar if they weren’t there already.

Make sure to subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t yet by hitting the button underneath and secure your invite!

Now that you’re all nicely situated, let’s dim the lights, as we call upon our first featured artist for the evening!

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▸ imase

We’re kicking things off in this month’s party with one of the more… interesting album releases that I’ve seen this year, by one of J-Pop’s fastest rising stars; global TikTok sensation imase.

It’s not too far a stretch of the imagination to say that imase took the world by storm with NIGHT DANCER. At the very least, when I heard it play from my mother’s phone one random night while she was scrolling through reels just passing the time, that’s the moment I understood just how viral this song of his was at its peak not just in Japan but internationally. Of course, what clued me in to that too was the fact that a multitude of artists have performed covers of it since it came out, which is my own barometer (and I’m sure a lot other people’s as well) of whether or not a song has truly become a cultural phenomenon. I personally see this as both a blessing and a curse for artists, as; on the one hand their name does end up reaching eyes and ears which it normally wouldn’t under normal circumstances; but on the other hand, it does make for a tougher act to follow up the bigger the song in question gets.

That being said, while I did see that as a potential problem for the twenty-three year-old back in 2022, imase has since went to prove that he’s not just a one hit wonder; coming out with back-to-back (to-back) theme song collaborations and commercial spots. I mean, c’mon, the man has a tie-up with *the* McDonald’s for crying out loud.

This dovetails into what I find… peculiar if not fascinating about his upcoming debut album, Bonsai which boasts a whopping nineteen (!) total tracks. However, it’s not the amount of songs that has really intrigued about this as it is the songs themselves that’s gonna be on it. You see, of the nineteen tracks that are gonna be on it, *fourteen* of those were used as promotional theme songs prior. I think that’s the most I’ve personally seen in a singular album and, looking at it from that perspective it is genuinely quite impressive. Suffice for it to say, this young man has done quite well for himself in the relatively short amount of time he’s been doing this for, and his star seems to only be shining even brighter.

Whether or not his first full album will play a huge part in that though will remain to be seen as, of the remaining five songs on the album that aren’t part of some sort of collab, only two of them are album originals. For those who are already fans of his, this is effectively a Best Of album, so I don’t see swaying much opinion on him that they didn’t already have. But, for listeners like me who only know of a couple of his songs in passing, it’s an opportunity to delve into his existing body of work in one convenient package, which is what I’m looking to do with it myself.

Bonsai is set to come out on May 15, 2024. Check out the trailer for it here!

▸ SennaRin

Our next featured artist is one that I’ve personally been very much excited for ever since their debut; SennaRin.

Admittedly though, rather than the singer herself, what caught my eye initially was instead the involvement of one Sawano Hiroyuki. My introduction to Sawano, which I reckon largely runs parallel to how a lot others as well, was through his handiwork in providing soundtracks and insert songs for anime shows as part of “SawanoHiroyuki[nZk]"; dubbed a vocal project which sees him work with many different singers, which notably include songs like aLIEz from Summer 2014’s anime original Aldnoah.Zero and sh0ut from Spring 2017’s Re:Creators. These are but just some among many others that Sawano has provided over what is now nearing a decade of being pretty much a staple presence in the anime scene, having made a name for himself as someone you can count on to deliver a banger OST for whatever show he’s working on.

Of course, Sawano himself is only one half of the equation, with the other half being the vocalists he chooses to sing his songs. This is where you’ll actually find his lesser-talked about skill (at least in my opinion) and it’s his ear for vocal talent. I’ve been convinced for a good while now that Sawano spends some amount of time on the Internet just being on the lookout for singers whom he sees potential in (he just like me fr /jk). After now having read about how he first found out about the burgeoning singer-songwriter SennaRin, it seems I wasn’t too far off.

While Sawano does call upon certain singers more often than others who he had worked with in the past, SennaRin would be one of the first who he will be producing for exclusively. This is where the bulk of my interest lies in this endeavor of his, as I’m genuinely curious as to the approach he’s going to take, now that he’s only working with one voice as opposed to having multiple with which to pick and choose from. Granted, so far it feels like an extension of his work as [nZk], with SennaRin’s singing even sounding par for the course in terms of Sawano’s preferred vocals (deep, range-y, and with good tremolo). The hope though is that he can break away from that sort of archetype and make something unique here.

We’ll see if does with the release of SennaRin’s first album ADRENA, coming out on May 15, 2024. I’m actually very happy to see Limit-tension make it to the list of songs that are gonna be on there as I do like it a lot, but I’m also looking forward to her new song vous which she’ll be singing alongside suis from Yorushika as a special guest feature.

▸ Daoko

Our next featured artist for the Advance Party is Daoko, whose career has been, for better or worse, a bit of an emotional rollercoaster ride.

Daoko’s music career thus far can broadly be summarized by looking at it in a tripartite view: her indie career under LOW HIGH WHO? as daoko; her career under major record label TOY’S FACTORY as DAOKO; and at present her career under her own label teftef as Daoko. Alternatively (and for some, more evidently), you can also see it in a tripartite view of her music. That is to say: her style of music prior to her involvement with producer TeddyLoid; her music after her involvement with TeddyLoid; and her music going back to her old style. We’ll go with the former, both for brevity’s sake, and also that I don’t want to make it seem as though TeddyLoid was largely responsible for shaping her career. It’s just an easier marker to reference, especially for those who first came across Daoko after she had worked with TeddyLoid on the song ME!ME!ME! as part of an animation project of the same name. Rather, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that this is probably most of the non-Japanese speaking parts of the world’s first exposure to Daoko.

That was the case with me back when I was just getting into listening to Japanese music. ME!ME!ME! was making a lot of waves in anime circles and after checking it out for myself I was very quickly enamored by both what I saw and more importantly what I heard. I had never heard anything quite like Daoko’s “whisper rap” at the time. In search of more of it, I found myself in a rabbit hole of her earlier albums (as those were all that there were at the time), all of which I absolutely adore to this day. I remember being so happy for her when she got signed, thinking there was going to be even more of her music to enjoy.

Except… that wasn’t what we got. Instead, she continued to get paired with named producers in the J-Pop industry and as a direct consequence we saw her slowly be made to fit a certain mold. Granted, it wasn’t without its successes (her song Uchiage Hanabi alongside Yonezu Kenshi in particular being a mainstream hit) but there was a distinct change in the direction of her music. This ultimately came to a head when she stopped doing her enamoring whisper rap altogether, where it seemed as though in becoming “DAOKO”, we ended up losing “daoko” in the process.

However, with the release of her most recent album anima, it appears as though not everything had been lost. More than that, it seems “Daoko” is currently reclaiming her old self, going back to her old style and even going as far employing some of her longtime producers from her indie days. The result? While not exactly the same as before, it just felt… right. That was three years ago today.

Slash-&-Burn, set to release on May 22, 2024 will be her first album as Daoko, and I am immensely excited to hear how it shapes up to be.

▸ TRiDENT

Next up on stage is one of the most promising Japanese Rock bands on the come up: the fiery hot trio of ASAKA, SERINA, and NAGISA; better known as TRiDENT.

The three-piece haling from Osaka is the successor to a band which, if you listen to a fair amount of Japanese Girls Rock, you might have actually heard of before called Girls Rock Band Kakumei (or “GRBK” for short). Originally a four-woman band in its inception in 2013, its founding members include vocalist/guitarist ASAKA and bassist SERINA who, during their time as students in the same school, found themselves in a light music club alongside guitarist Lora and drummer JUNNA. Together they formed GRBK. Their time as a quartet would be cut short though as Lora would leave the band in 2015. They would make their official debut, now as a trio, in 2017 with the release of the album DON’T STOP. The band would release two more mini-albums in the years that followed, after which drummer JUNNA would also announce her departure from GRBK in 2020, citing creative differences with the other two members and their management about how to move forward with their music careers.

Although her graduation was largely seen as amicable (or at least enough for GRBK to make a 4-koma series depicting it), it did ultimately coincide with the band having to cease activities in the absence of a drummer. JUNNA wasn’t also just any drummer at that, as during that time she had already amassed a fair amount of popularity for herself through her YouTube channel where she uploaded drum covers (with her most popular one currently sitting at 14 *million* views). I think it’s fair to say that that notoriety brought its own share of fans to GRBK that she then more than likely took along with her after she left.

While it looked as if all signs pointed towards a complete dissolution for the band, ASAKA and SERINA would announce a “resurrection” mere months after holding their final live show as GRBK, this time enlisting the help of drummer NAGISA to form the band we now know as TRiDENT. They would release their debut single Continue that same year, further signaling that their spirit of “revolution” (Kakumei lit. Revolution) continues to live on with them.

And boy has it ever. It’s actually amazing if nothing short of miraculous even that the band has had the pleasure of coming across such a talented and charismatic drummer in JUNNA not just once but now twice over in NAGISA who has so far shown to have just as much talent and charisma, with the band pretty much picking up where they briefly left off with no signs of slowing down.

TRiDENT will be releasing their third mini-album Spice X on May 22, 2024.

▸ miwa

Our final guest feature for this month is one of, if not the most critically acclaimed artist we’ve yet to have here on the Advance Party with three RIAJ Gold Album Certifications to her name, singer-songwriter miwa.

When she came into the scene in 2010, it was back when the Japanese music industry was experiencing a post-YUI world for the first time, where it was as if acoustic guitar-playing female singer-songwriters seemed to be taking over. At the very least, that’s what it felt when many others (most notably the likes of Tsuji Shion and Abe Mao) started to burst into the scene following the aforementioned J-Pop sensation. Among them though, one artist stood out, particularly after a promising debut single in don’t cry anymore caught everyone’s attention. That being said, despite the many good things that could have been said about people’s first introduction to the young artist from Kanagawa, listeners were instead very quick to categorize miwa as being “just” another YUI-like artist to come out of the woodwork.

Perhaps such murmurings reached her and/or her management, as not long thereafter she would come out with the song chAngE which, true to its title, really did “change” the way people perceived her as. Although mostly known nowadays one of the most popular anime theme songs both during its time and even still to this day, its significance to miwa’s career lies in the direction that it took; specifically with miwa picking up an electric guitar to use for the track in lieu of an acoustic one. Fans theorize that the capitalized “A” and “E” in the song’s title is meant to signify her going from an “acoustic” guitar sound to an “electric”, as a show of both her depth and maturation as a musician, but also showing people that she’s not trying to be another YUI; she is miwa.

The rest, as they say is history, and she has since enjoyed a career that has now lasted far longer than most of her contemporaries. After releasing the album Sparkle back in 2022, miwa is back with what will now be her seventh full album release this month (the aptly named 7th) which… is going to be a curious one. The album will have seventeen total tracks on it; the most that she’s ever had on one. Something to note with regard to that though is that for some reason or another, literally the *entirety* of her Kimi ni Koishita Koto Kara EP is jammed into the album which should account for that number being as high as it is. Historically too is that, miwa’s albums were largely carried by her blowout A-sides wherein I don’t think she’s gonna have that same luxury here as much as before, so it’s gonna be interesting to see how that’s gonna play into this release.

7th will be coming out on May 29, 2024.

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That’s gonna do it for the J-Music Advance Party for May!

Here’s a quick recap of all the releases featured for this month:

Which release are you most excited for this month? Likewise, which bands and artists are you looking to listen these next couple of weeks? Let me know all of that down in the comments!

The next Advance Party is gonna be on June 8, 2024.
Are you looking forward to any releases next month?
Check back here to see if they get featured!

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