When my listening habits first swung towards Japan, Plastic Girl In Closet from Iwate prefecture was in heavy rotation, in particular their 2014 album Eye Cue Rew See, though I favoured the 2022 remake of that record because… I don’t really know, actually. Advertised as “re-edited, re-recorded, and re-mixed”, presumably it’s better produced and better performed because experience, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gone and A-B-ed the two versions on streaming and I don’t have the bias of history with the original edition skewing my opinions.

In any case, I had intended to blog about it but despite having two complete different versions of the album, there’s no official videos or AV media to support it so I just never got around to it, and at some point their confluence of shoegazey guitars, bubblegum melodies, and electro-dreampop textures fell out of rotation, maybe on account or it all just being a little too sugary overall, but revisiting them in smaller doses is still immensely enjoyable.

This comes up now because they’ve just announced their fifth album, High Heart, which will be coming out August 20. It will include all six of the the singles they’re released since “Baumkuchan” in April 2023. “Can’t Stop My Heart” came out last April, and marked drummer Takaaki Tsukui’s last release with the band. Presumably he plays on all the previously released singles, but whether he is on the rest of the album is unclear – the band have opted to continue on as a duo, officially.

Having been around since 2003, PGIC are some OGs and I look forward to being reminded of why I had them in heavy rotation a few years ago.