Keeping up with Japanese bands when you don’t have any real kind of understanding of the language is… imprecise at best. You have a fighting chance with the acts who exist at least at a cursory level in English, but those who transact mainly in Japanese kanji will always remain, at some level, a mystery to foreigners. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effort.

Case in point, over the last while I’ve been seeing 揺れるは幽霊 – or yureruwayurei… or yureru wa yurei… or The Ghost Is Shaking – showing up in various Japanese shoegaze socials, and their debut EP Mnemoid, which came out earlier this month. If there’d been any kind of buzz growing beforehand, I certainly didn’t see it but then even if I had, would I have known what I was looking at?

But the important takeaway is that people are talking about them because, well, they’re really quite good. Mnemoid is atmospheric enough to satisfy the ‘gazers and direct enough to satisfy the rockers and is quite addictive, not unlike next big things Kurayamisaka. Interestingly, though the band appears to be wholly independent at this point, the CD release is listed internationally which generally doesn’t happen for Japanese indie releases?

In any case, while the EP is their first official statement, earlier recordings are easily accessible online – five demos are up on their Bandcamp as 幽霊計画.demo (Ghost Project Demo), and four of those five as well as another demo recording of the EP’s opening track 「 Bōrei no kimi e」are available on their Soundcloud, meaning there’s one track that appears only on the Bandcamp release. And there’s also a single “Fragment”, released last August, that appears nowhere else. Keeping up? Good.

The track I’ve chose to share is 「鯨骨群衆」, or “Whalebone Crowd”, which was their first video from the EP and which appears on each of the EP, Bandcamp, and Soundcloud, as well as a couple of live recordings from earlier this month at shows in Nagoya and Tokyo, courtesy of J-gaze documentarian Angel’s Channel.