It’s impossible to get into the Japanese music scene even a little without encountering the world of idols, and by extension, alt-idols, which basically is the combination of idols with alternative music genres (see: Babymetal). It’s strange and fascinating and actually quite entertaining live – I saw Planet After The Rain at a shoegaze showcase in Tokyo this past Spring and it was fun!

Point being, idol-shoegaze is a thing and it was basically started by the cryptic outfit known as ……… – aka Dots Tokyo – which existed from 2016 to 2019 with two albums. Shortly after they disbanded – like weeks – the new outfit RAY emerged, sharing management, songwriting (if you hear the influence of For Tracy Hyde on their songs, it’s not an accident), and one member – Uchiyama Yua – and musical aesthetic. And also one of their best songs, 「サテライト」or “Satellite”.

An ultra-melodic guitar-driven hookfest, it first appeared on Dots’ 2017 しゅわしゅわ (or “Fizz”) EP with vocals by both the band and the Hatsune Miku vocaloid synthesizer and if “vocaloid” is a term that doesn’t mean anything to you… that’s another rabbit hole. Anyways it was also included on the 2018 album 『 』(or “Blank”), and after Dots gave way to RAY, a new extended version closed out that band’s 2020 debut Pink. I can (and do) sometimes listen to all versions in a row and it just gives you a buzz, man. Sugar-gaze.

Cozy Scrapbook translated the lyrics to English last year, if that’s of interest.

・・・・・・・・・ – サテライト (Satellite) @ Cozy Scrapbook

And I’ll admit, I’m just curious how bizarre the URL for this post will look.

So here’s the album version:

The Hatsune Miku version:

A couple live versions:

And the RAY version, which comes with official video though the album version is two minutes longer:

And a guitar cover video which I learned the song from. It’s fun to play!