Tokyo-based musician Nana Yamato announces her debut album, Before Sunrise, out February 5th on Dull Tools, and presents the lead single/video “If.” By day, Yamato is an ordinary girl who marches anonymously between her flat, her school and her job. But by night, she becomes something else — a young artist and record collector whose urge for connection and expression has created one of the best underground pop records to come out of Japan, and elsewhere for that matter. Her calling was found when one day she entered Big Love Records in Harajuku, Tokyo to buy an Iceage album. She then began going there everyday after school, where her studies shifted to the week’s latest indie rock releases. “Everything in my life started there.”
Yamato’s brilliance lies in a profound imagination that confronts the isolation and claustrophobia of Tokyo life, without losing grasp of the whimsy and romance of girlhood. It’s hard to ignore the romance the artist has with the streets that she walks; Japanese and English vocals sing about the lights and sounds of the city, as if there’s no place else she could exist. Each song on Before Sunrise is a secret hidden in the late-night glow of a young girl’s bedroom, created in the precious witching hours of the teenage heart, before dawn returns with the tedious demands of adulthood. Dreams, and the language of living inside one’s imagination, are the prevailing theme of Before Sunrise. Yamato describes her style as “critical fantasy,” a fitting label for a sound that exists as much in a carefree daydream as they do in a crowded subway.
Throughout lead single “If,” a collage of drum machine, grungy guitar and synth are the terrain over which Nana’s voice floats. Singing in Japanese and English, her words are delivered with a cool confidence, as if fearlessly navigating a bizarre dreamscape. On “If,” Nana Yamato defines a new idiom of city music. Much in the way trip-hop articulated the nightlife of Bristol and London, she scores the soundtrack of an imaginative introvert wandering a crowded metropolis, hiding in plain sight in the hazy glow of neon. For the video, Yamato studied patterns of various animals and traced them frame by frame, making nearly 200 drawings. “The video is set up with me as an up-and-coming cartoonist who’s on deadline,” Nana explains. “She falls asleep while thinking about the comic. In her dreams, she meets the characters she created. She gets lost in her own imaginary world. My work is realistic fantasy, or critical fantasy. It’s not about fantasizing to escape reality, but about fighting reality by fantasizing.”
Nana’s debut LP, much like her previous 7” records released under the ANNA moniker, is a strictly DIY affair. Yamato sings and plays guitar, creates beats and MIDI melodies, in addition to creating the drawings and design of the LP itself. Produced by P.E.’sJonathan Schenke, who has worked with Parquet Courts, Liars, and Surfbort, among others, Before Sunrise marks the arrival of an artist who has found her voice. She is not just the pupil of the new arrivals bin, but of a life spent as a defiant dreamer, in the secret world that begins after childhood and before sunrise.
Watch Nana Yamato’s Video for “If”
Pre-order Before Sunrise
Big Cartel
Bandcamp
Before Sunrise Tracklist
1.Do You Wanna
2. If
3. Burning Desire
4. Gaito
5. Dreamwanderer
6. Fantasy
7. Polka Dot Bells
8. Before Sunrise
9. Voyage et Merci
10. Under The Cherry Moon
11. Morning Street
12. The Day Song
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Jacob at Pitch Perfect PR.]
