The Japanese band Chai is a professional purveyor of whimsy. In
concert, its four members perform wearing an array of colorful, coordinated
outfits — loads of pink, lots of orange, some reds and greens, but never black.
Its lead singer and keyboardist, Mana, will sometimes deliver exuberant
monologues about “Neo-Kawaii,” a band-created ethos meant to redefine modern
ideals of cuteness. (The phrase translates directly to “new cute.”) The group
has been known to cover Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon.” The refrain of one of
its most popular songs, “N.E.O.,” goes “You are so cute! Nice face!”
اضافة اعلان
“We’ve always been kind of energetic,” Mana said in a recent
video interview from Tokyo, through the band’s translator. “It’s not that we
decided to just go out and be extroverts.”
That said, the band ran into a minor problem when working on the
follow-up to its 2019 breakout record, “Punk”: Channeling all that energy in
the studio wasn’t so easy, and its attempts to “dumb it down” weren’t very fun.
“It’s actually harder for us than to go all out onstage,” Mana
said.
But when the pandemic forced the group to remain in Japan rather
than continue touring the world, its members found themselves with an
unexpected moment to breathe. They pursued other interests — Mana started an
Instagram account for dog lovers; bassist-lyricist Yuuki got into
pottery — and
more consciously considered the new music they wanted to make, now that they
didn’t have to hunt for studio time in between global commitments.
Owing to the band’s growing debt to hip-hop, the drummer, Yuna,
started experimenting with her playing technique in GarageBand. And Mana, who
primarily drives the band’s music, worked on cultivating an album she described
as “more than a human friend — someone you can go to when you’re upset, someone
you go to when you’re happy, when you wake up first thing in the morning, when
you want to cry.”
The result is “Wink,” out Friday, a record that doesn’t dim Chai’s
enthusiasm so much as redirect it across genres and moods. Because Chai looks
like a traditional four-piece band, it’s easy to see it as a rock group, when
in reality its sound reflects a style-bending pool of influences. On “Wink,”
the scrappiness of Chai’s early records is peeled back to reveal a dreamier
collection of melodies driven by Yuna’s sprightly and varied drumming.
A song like “Nobody Knows We Are Fun” lingers in a hazy,
whispered register before suddenly flowering into a chanted singalong, while “End”
energetically toggles between rapping and singing. (Mana cited R&B group
TLC and rapper Mac Miller as influences.) “Wink” will be released in Japan
through Sony, but the band signed with the prestigious indie label Sub Pop —
one of a handful of suitors — for its
US release.
“As a listener, you never really know what to expect when you
hear a new song,” said Julien Ehrlich of the band Whitney, who toured with Chai
at the beginning of 2020. “It’s completely not formulaic, the way that they
create things — and they’re always trying to change it, which is really
exciting.”
Growing up, the members of Chai hadn’t been exposed to much
Western music. That changed in college, when a friend of Yuna’s made them a
playlist of eclectic artists who would become formative influences: Basement
Jaxx, Tune-Yards, Justice. Very quickly, the band members formed a distinct
identity — matching outfits, an obsession with food — and bonded over their
alienation from the beauty standards of their native country.
“We didn’t fit into this definition of cute, which was
considered the biggest form of accomplishment in Japan,” said Mana, wearing a
basic red T-shirt reading “Overdressed.” “Once we started exchanging our
insecurities, it gradually became a kind of comfort blanket.”
She pointed to their adoption of the color pink, widely
considered a childish hue in Japan, as one such way of repudiating those
expectations. Early on, the members also claimed they used stage names as a way
of obscuring their identities. Over time they’ve admitted that Yuuki and Yuna
are real names, while Mana and Kana are adopted from nicknames — it was just
cooler to imagine otherwise, and definitely cooler when styled in all caps, as
the band does.
Japan has pitched from one state of lockdown to another, but the
band has started scheduling live concerts for the summer and beyond. Finding a
way to perform these quieter songs in concert is a new challenge, as is
resuming the band’s momentum, but the Chai members were sanguine about the
future.
“It’s because it’s the four of us that we have a special message
to say,” Mana said. “We never even really consider ourselves just a band — we
dance, sometimes we do DJ sets, we do all different types of things. We
consider our genre just ‘Chai.’”
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