Jo’s Moving Day aren’t quite as shadowy as the last instalment of my “mysterious Chinese shoegaze” series – they have an Instagram! – but finding out much about the fresh-faced Guangzhou quintet isn’t easy if you don’t read Chinese (which I do not). But at least their 2021 debut Itinerary is widely available via streaming and they’ve got a few videos available to watch. And from this, I can say the following.

They hew to a pretty straightforward shoegaze/dreampop template, with the guitars that go loud and bendy and the coed-but-female-led vocals, but to these aged ears they bring something new to it that I can’t quite put my finger on. It could be the production, which sounds less devoted to recreating the tones of the ’90s but also don’t consciously run away from them (read: they’re not slavishly trying to recreate the pedalboards of their influences, like some people I could name).

Their one official video is for the closing track of Itinerary, which while not the best track on the record is one of the more grandiose. The accompanying description leads into the theme of the clip:

People in ancient times regarded amber as a sacred object, which was conceived by the power of nature that has been weathered for a long time, and many legends have been born in combination with folk culture… In the world of romanticism, amber is the illusion of love, and in the fantasy story of housewarming day, it is a girl who refuses to be sealed into “eternity”, trying to break free from the prejudices solidified by the world and the evil temptation wrapped in sweet beeswax. It also uses amber as a metaphor for the pursuit of freedom after turning from a cocoon into a butterfly.

Jo’s Moving Day – “Amber”

So there’s that. But speaking as someone who’s been only finding out about new ‘gazey acts from around the world after they’ve split, discovering something that tickles my ears AND is still a going concern – even if I’ll almost certainly never get to see them live – is nice.