Remains

Review of Remains by 東京酒吐座 (Tokyo Shoegazer)

I’d never heard of 東京酒吐座 (Tokyo Shoegazer) until last week, when I stumbled on their new album Remains. Maybe it was the three-eyed cat on the cover hypnotising me, dragging me down into its litter of kittens to be buried in shoegaze. I stayed for the full 40 minutes. Turns out they’ve been doing this for fifteen years, and I’m just late.

“Pulse” opens with a marching rhythm, drums front and centre. It’s one of the only times on the record the drums take the lead. For the next 35 minutes the guitars swallow everything. Underneath, the bass starts with a slide every few bars and slowly builds into a full riff, adding texture without stealing the drums’ spotlight.

“Wisteria” would work as a Seinen anime theme. Black-and-white frames, a protagonist standing in an open field surrounded by flowers. The drums are deep and raw, the guitars softer, weaving gentle riffs that stick out because of the dark bass. Two tracks in and the bass player is quietly becoming the most interesting thing on the record.

“Sahara’s vocals are also not shoegaze at all. I was introduced to her through a mutual acquaintance, and she’s more into Shiina Ringo and that kind of thing, and she’s not at all into the shoegaze falsetto singing style. But her ability to absorb and adapt is incredible. She picks up everything you throw at her. Even if I give her a request that’s a bit unconventional, she’ll have absorbed it all by the next rehearsal.” — Yoshitaka Sugahara (Rolling Stone Japan, 2026)

Sahara’s vocals break what the band themselves call the shoegaze curse. The genre’s biggest weakness is that everything blurs into one wash of sound. It’s like mixing paints: add enough colours and you always end up with the same muddy black. Sahara doesn’t blur. Her voice sits on top of the mix, gentle and theatrical, refusing to dissolve into the guitars.

“The Reckoning” goes full shoegaze, and I preferred the balance of the first two tracks. They had the guitar storm too, but in waves. The drums, bass, and softer riffs cut breathing space into them. “The Reckoning” doesn’t bother. By the halfway mark the bass is gone, the drums are buried, and it’s more noise than song.

“Missing” pulls back the volume. Sahara takes centre stage, the guitars retreat into the mix and sound more like rain than a full storm. After “The Reckoning”’s assault the track feels like a recovery rather than a song in its own right. It lacks a defining feature, the kind “Pulse” and “Wisteria” had.

“Haze” is “Missing” again at a different rhythm. The title is honest. The middle of the album is a haze, and nothing in it sticks.

“Vega” starts to blend shoegaze with dream-pop guitar lines, and Sahara’s vocals really work well with the dream-pop genre. It gives me Magdalena Bay. The track moves between two textures, floating relaxed vocals and riffs that then pull you back in with dirty, raw guitar and bass. It pulls the album out of the haze of the middle section.

Okay, call me whatever you want, but the moment “New Dawn” started playing the only thing I could hear was Keane’s “Somewhere Only We Know.” That’s not a bad thing, I love that 2004 banger. “New Dawn” has the same lift in the chorus, the same kind of melodic optimism, just dressed in shoegaze clothing. It’s a fun song, though a bit stretched out at 6:40.

“Remains” is supposed to be the creative centerpiece of the album. It starts slow and fragile, Sahara’s vocals leading, the instrumentals leaning more toward pop than shoegaze. The track builds toward the climax you know is coming. Then at 3:31 the transition arrives and falls flat. No sugarcoating it: the song doesn’t earn its own buildup. The drop into the wall of noise should hit like a release, and it doesn’t.

The closing stretch saves it. The alternating guitar riffs in the final section are some of the best guitar playing on the album, and they pay off the song’s slow opening properly. If “Wisteria” was the Seinen anime theme, “Remains” is the closing credits. The protagonist walks off through a literal storm, church bells ringing in the distance.

Remains is the sound of a band fifteen years in, still trying to find new ground. New vocalist Sahara is the best thing to happen to them in years, pulling the record toward more theatrical dream-pop moments and away from pure shoegaze. The album has its strengths, but it lacks diversity. The band hasn’t fully broken what they call the shoegazer curse, and the middle of the album is where it shows. I hope they get another decade, and that they keep finding ways to push the sound somewhere new.

Featured Tracks

Pulse

Wisteria

Remains