Shintaro Sakamoto – Yoo-hoo

Since the dissolution of Yura Yura Teikoku, Shintaro Sakamoto has refined a solo language built on understatement. Where his former band favoured volatility, his solo records proceed at lower pressure, privileging texture, spacing and grooves that remain deliberately underdeveloped. On his fifth solo album, Yoo-hoo, that approach resolves into a two-part movement, the record gradually shifting from suspension into motion without ever announcing the change. Is There a Place For You There? establishes the album’s opening register, its unhurried and blown-out vocal and flattened delivery setting a mood of controlled inertia, melting against, even slowing the beckoning rhythm of Yuta Suganuma's drums. The early stretch is governed by tactile detail. Protect Your Brain turns on a dry, wooden guiro scrape, its rhythm skeletal and insistent, circling rather than advancing.

From On the Other Side of Time, propulsion begins to register. The track reconnects with Sakamoto’s band-era psychedelia, its motorik pulse loosened and partially obscured. The Clock Began to Move extends that shift through repetition and muted groove, aligning Sakamoto with Stereolab’s cooler end of pop abstraction. Numb introduces a sharper rhythmic profile, its pinfire funk, horns and tape-warped guitar bringing the album’s latent groove into clearer focus. The title track closes in the same manner, unforced and economical. Yoo-hoo maintains its equilibrium to the end, resisting emphasis or release.

Listen to: Protect Your Brain, Numb, Yoo-hoo