Hollow Me | Beautiful

Yura Yura Teikoku's Hollow Me accompanied by the Beautiful EP. Japan's Yura Yura Teikoku are a bona fide institution at home, arguably the only "underground" psychedelic group there to have achieved "overground" success. They've gathered a huge following over the past 20 years, yet become progressively stranger and more experimental, cramming both weird and classic influences into a unique, potent form.

Hollow Me, their tenth studio album, abandons the ecstatic, blown-out psychedelia of their earlier work for a more subdued, streamlined trip into their strange pop world. The songs are more linear, and both the lyrics and music impart a general feeling of emptiness or "hollowness." Sakamoto's fierce guitar work is legendary in Japan, yet the album contains not a single guitar solo. As if to instantly prepare the listener for a different kind of ride, opener "Ohayo Mada Yarou," a timeless classic that comes off as a skewed Marvin Gaye track on downers, features a lead sazophone. "Dekinai" and "Sweet Surrender" Pair a deep, fuzzed-out rhythm section with Sakamoto's hypnotic wail for two of the weirdest dance tracks ever put to tape, like T-Rex jamming with ESG. And the album version of "Beautiful" trades the EP counterpart's lush, power pop a la Big Star for a percussion-heavy jam with hints of doo-wop.