If there’s a trend in Japanese shoegaze, it’s that the bands and records that are most hallowed are inevitably the ones that dropped one record a decade or more ago that everyone name-checks and adores, then disappeared off the face of the earth. Okay, this is probably quantifiably not true but is most definitely the case with Pasteboard.

Tokyo-based digital magazine sabukara.online has the best bio of the band I could find, though it only exists on their Instagram and not the publication itself. It turns out Pasteboard was actually a side-project for the Saitama, Japan duo of Mihoko Tanoue and Makoto Igarashi – their main musical project was Roly Poly Rag Bear, a guitar pop project which was started in 1998. They created the Pasteboard persona as a way to explore their shoegaze fandom, not expecting that one-off to eclipse their other endeavours the way that it did.

Pasteboard released one record – Glitter – independently on CD in 2005, copies of which cost hundreds of dollars, and until very recently, was not available to stream on any official channels (I don’t count fan uploads on YouTube). As stated above, it was only in 2023 that 7th Heaven Recordings was able to get in touch with the band and receive permission to reissue the album. Naturally, all copies in all formats sold out and those, too, now cost hundreds of dollars. But at least you can stream it.

What’s interesting about Glitter is that it at first listen, it hardly checks off any of the boxes of what one would call shoegaze. The record is not drenched in reverb, nor distortion, but instead has a sunny, mid-fi aesthetic and mostly strummy, clean guitar with hypnotically repeated figures. Sure, there is a song called “Shoegazer”, and it’s followed by “Slowdive” – which like the song by spiritual descendants Moon In June is neither a Siouxsie & The Banshees cover nor sound anything like Slowdive – but there’s no sonic playbook at work here.

What there is a deep sense of nostalgia, youth, and general blissed out vibes – and what is the spirit of shoegaze if not vibes? This is why, for all its sonic outlierness, Pasteboard’s cred is unassailable in the genre – if you’re dogmatic you could argue it doesn’t sound like shoegaze, maybe, but it absolutely feels like it.

As part of their reissue – which includes new songs recorded as recently as 2010 – 7th Heaven got a video the band released for “Freesoul” cleaned up and put online, as well as a “making of” video for the video, with behind-the-scenes footage and outtakes.