My 2025 Q3 Roundup

I forgot about this blog thing up until yesterday, might write more later (probably will be too lazy to be honest).

Such as a great first album, and somehow sounds even better live.

Check out this Agp Studio youtube channel, there's a lot of neat live shows to dig through if you have the time. And if you still have the time, also check out @LIV_tokyo.

2025 really is the year of Japanese Shoegaze, there's so much great new stuff coming out, like Hammer Head Shark, and iVy, and even though kuni's first album is more generally indie rock like SYAYOS above, there's still bangers like this song so I'm counting them too.

Fun fact, o_all performed at SYAYOS' 1st album release party.

I know I've been saying this a again and again, but The Otals continues to be my favourite band at the moment, there's just something about the super sweet dreamy fuzzy pop rock vocals and instrumentals just gets to me.

Here in their second album All Imperfect Summerland, they sound even cleaner, and better than ever. Compare the album version for the earlier version of 天使にマーチンを The Angel Wears Dr. Martens for example, it's a lot more stripped back, cleaner, but still as sweet and fuzzy as before where it matters.

My favourite entry in VocaDuo 2025.

I've been listening to ユシナ UhsiNa for a bit now, their old popular stuff can be bit of a miss sometimes, but when it hits it's really fantastic, I really love 白い部屋 for example. It's lovely to see ユシナ partnering with i_ for this vocaduo, who have been making covers of their songs.

I've been pretty enamored with kaza lately, who have been making some interesting collabs, like this song w/ MIDy on Youtube Music Weekend (wellll, the production is great but the song is eh).

I know about kaza for a while now, but this is the first song where I really started taking notice of kaza, and also the producer KAIRUI. Love the subtitles.

I was also really tempted to instead use this recent cover of the classic 鳥の詩 Tori no Uta, remixed by adomiori. The illustrations are great; I'm always a sucker of some kind of virtual / real life crossing, and the visuals here is simple but really lovely; the remix somehow makes the song sound refreshing and new, without changing too much. adomiori's newest we search. EP is also worth checking out.

Listening to a lot of KAIRUI recently, including this song even though the album's released back in January. Love the slow ED theme vibes with the electronic synths.

KAIRUI have also been doing a number of collab recently, like kaza's Green, remix of Kaf's Replacable Goodbye, and 白迦 paica's 凪 Nagi.

The winner of VocaColle 2025 Summer, Rookie section. As usual, the best entries are somehow all from the rookie section, instead of the main "Top100" section. Well, maybe sabio being qualified as a rookie is a bit unfair to other rookies, as he has experience playing keyboards in the band "Hi Cheers!" previously, and already producing vocaloid songs for more than a year.

Even so, this song is such a fantastic anthem, with really nice electronic touches, I'm sure it would have won the main section if it's ranked over there. Definitely a producer to look out for in the future imo.

I was also rooting for the 2nd place entry, for its cheerful, slightly glitchy electronic pop. It was nice seeing my favourite entried ranked #1 and #2 :p But I thhink I haven't listened to as many entries this time to be honest, so I'm probably missing some obscure gems.

Over on the main section, sheeno mirin is still not talked about enough in the English communities imo. Also check out his comment under the youtube video.