Osaka’s Yuragi nearly perfected the Japanese dreampop/shoegaze aesthetic of mating cacaphonous noise with sugar-sweet melody with their first releases – 2016’s Nightlife EP and 2018’s Still Dreaming, Still Deafening – so it’s not entirely surprising that their subsequent releases didn’t bother retreading the same ground. Both 2021’s For You, Adroit It But Soft and 2023’s Here I Stand were more experimental in structure and tone, prog with occasional moments of pop but mostly showcasing a band exploring the meaning of sound and song. I’ve found them interesting listens, and I respect their musical adventurousness, but they didn’t grab me the way the early material did.
Their fourth album (I count Deafening as an album, some don’t) In Your Languages, released last week, is a surprising turn. The band looked to ’60s pop, ’70s prog, and folk music for inspiration on this record and acknowledged to putting a stronger focus on the songwriting. The result is a record that is still sonically adventurous but has an open-hearted warmness and simplicity at its core. It’s a beautiful record, and is more immediately compelling to me than their other recent work.
There’s a feature interview with the band in Rolling Stone Japan that actually Google Translates pretty coherently:
Advance singles from the new album were accompanied by lyric videos – in English as well as Japanese – but with the album release has come a rather gorgeously-shot film for the entire record. Definitely worth a listen and a watch.
