Bae

Yung Bae's "Bae" is a shimmering confection of future funk and Japanese city pop, its entire emotional register set to the frequency of golden-hour nostalgia experienced by someone who wasn't there for the original moment. The production chops and filters vintage funk and boogie samples — smooth bass lines, crisp hi-hats, those crystalline keyboard tones that defined late-seventies Tokyo pop — into something simultaneously retro and hypermodern. There is a sensuality baked into the texture itself, the way the reverb blooms on every note like warmth spreading through a sunlit room. Yung Bae, a Portland-based producer, helped crystallize the internet-born future funk movement that discovered city pop through Macintosh Plus and built its own mythology around Mariya Takeuchi and Tatsuro Yamashita. "Bae" functions as an aesthetic declaration — it is music for imagined memories, for a romanticized Tokyo of the imagination, all neon and saxophone and effortless cool. Best heard through good speakers while doing nothing in particular, letting the groove do the living for you.