Boys Don't Cry

Shintaro Sakamoto operates in a register that feels borrowed from another decade without ever feeling like pastiche. "Boys Don't Cry" — sharing its title with a Cure classic but arriving somewhere entirely different — is built from the kind of laidback groove that feels almost pharmaceutical in its effect on the nervous system: things slow down, peripheral details come into focus, time becomes negotiable. The guitar work is warm and slightly muted, sitting in the pocket of a rhythm section that swings without straining, the whole arrangement suggesting ease achieved through genuine craft rather than laziness. His voice is distinctive in its flatness — not emotionally flat but texturally so, delivered with a diffident quality that paradoxically creates intimacy, as if he is singing not at you but nearby, and you happen to be listening. The lyrical terrain engages masculine emotional restraint — the performance of toughness as a kind of costume — but approaches it obliquely, with the understated irony that characterizes his best work. Culturally, Sakamoto belongs to a strand of Japanese indie rock that absorbed the influence of krautrock, city-pop, and 70s American soft rock into something that sounds entirely Japanese without being referential. You would put this on in the late afternoon when the light turns golden and you have nowhere urgent to be — music that makes the present tense feel sufficient.