Wild Ones

The opening of "Wild Ones" arrives with the swagger of a band that has decided restraint is someone else's problem — electric guitars locking into a riff that feels inherited from the great rock and roll tradition while sounding entirely at home in contemporary Japanese rock. There is a deliberate primitivism to the production, a preference for analog warmth and physical impact over digital polish, and it gives the track the texture of something that could have existed in any decade while remaining urgently present. Superfly's vocalist commands the song the way a force of nature commands a landscape: the voice does not ask for attention, it simply occupies all available space and you orient yourself around it. Lyrically the song romanticizes a kind of freedom that exists at the edge of social acceptability — people who run toward something rather than from it, who choose the harder, wilder path not out of recklessness but out of genuine hunger for an unmediated experience of life. There is pleasure in the chorus that is almost physical, the sort that arrives when a rock band locks into the pocket and refuses to let go. This sits in a tradition of Japanese rock that absorbed Western influences without apologizing for them, and it works because Superfly's commitment to the material is absolute — there is no irony here, only conviction. Play it loud, in a car, with the windows down, at a speed you will not admit to afterward.