One of the OGs of the current Japanese shoegaze scene, the oddly-named-even-for-Japan Seventeen Years Old And Berlin Wall have been releasing mini-albums of boy-girl sharp-sweet fuzzy-shimmering dreampop since 2015. Whether they number four or five depends on your criteria for distinguishing an EP from a mini-album, and whether mini-album is even a thing – the first three releases were six songs apiece and clocked in at under 23 minutes; this year’s Distance was only four songs and 14 minutes, but perhaps most crucially, it wasn’t granted a physical release. So okay, three mini-albums and an EP.

What’s less up for discussion is that their second release – 2017’s Reflect – is their finest work to date, hitting the sweet spot of all those adjectives noted above. More recent works have dialed down the noise and that’s cool, everyone grows and changes, but the video for “Prism” really captures the youth and energy of that moment in time, and the colour-coded visuals – while quite on the nose – are still lovely and match the tune perfectly.

Oh, and for the whys of their name, they answered in an interview with NoiseArtists a few years ago:

It’s a combination of “17 years old”, which often appears in the lyrics of Japanese rock bands and is experienced by most humans, and “Berlin Wall”, which everybody knows by name but very few people have actually seen in real life.

17歳とベルリンの壁, THE INTERVIEW @ NoiseArtists