春泥棒

This is Yorushika at their most kinetic. Where many of their tracks hold something back, this one surges forward from the first measure — guitar strumming at a pace that suggests barely contained excitement, percussion crisp and propulsive, the production bright and slightly wind-blown in character. Suis's voice is elastic here: she moves quickly through syllables, tumbles through phrases, catches breath at the last possible moment. The song is about spring the way running is about running — not the philosophy of it but the physical, immediate fact. There is a thief in the title, and what's being stolen is time — specifically the beautiful, irretrievable time of youth that disappears while you're inside it. The lyric emotional arc describes someone who is aware, even in the midst of joy, that the joy is already leaving. That undercurrent of melancholy gives the song its complexity; on the surface it is joyful, even giddy, but there is something aching underneath. Culturally it is deeply aligned with Japanese sensibilities around mono no aware — the pathos of impermanence — filtered through contemporary indie songwriting. You listen to this on a bicycle in early April, when the cherry blossoms have just opened and the air still has a slight chill and everything is briefly, impossibly beautiful. You listen and know that you will not be able to hold it. That's the whole song.