The Best Japanese Shoegaze Band You’ve Never Heard Of: Kinoko Teikoku

Every Sunday, milk crate revisits an iconic piece of music history—artist, album, or otherwise—as a part of our weekly crate digging series.

Design by Sophie Parrish

By Christian Jones

The word shoegaze is annoyingly ubiquitous now. Having catapulted into mainstream cultural consciousness within the last couple of years thanks to the TikTok-ification of subgenres and the growing sophistication of Big Streaming’s music recommendation algorithms, the genre has exploded into all kinds of new contexts. As with any reiteration of a genre, there are two viable motions: a nostalgic return or intrepid innovation. There are the less innovative (for better or worse) nu-nugazers like Whirr, Hotline TNT, Wisp. There are the mavericks. Weatherday is an awesome mix of emo, lo fi, and shoegaze. Wednesday, who are indebted to The Swirlies, and MJ Lendermann’s 2022 Boat Songs have been described as “countrygaze.” Otherwise, shoegaze has become a diffuse reference point for artists of the post-genre internet. It’s impossible not to feel the ghost of shoegaze past in Dean Blunt’s drone or early bar italia’s hypnotic swirl. It seems like there is now a one-in-three chance that any friend of a friend in an alternative band makes “shoegazey” music. By this, there is a one-in-two chance that they actually mean shoegaze or the kind of moody, vaguely depressive sound that would collapse Duster, Cigarettes After Sex, and Slowdive into the same moniker. After all, according to Pitchfork, as of 2023, #shoegaze amassed more than 730 million views on TikTok. In this flood of content are innumerable video edits, OOTDs, and memes that flanderized the genre into an aesthetic signifier, repeated and consumed ad infinitum by Gen-Z’s doomerist, nostalgia-obsessed teens. It’s seen best in the wojak charts that were extremely popular on Reddit threads and early indie-music Instagram pages around the pandemic.

This phenomenon isn’t that much unlike the shoegaze-heavy soundtracks of Gregg Araki’s punky New Queer Cinema—that was my introduction to the genre. Still, his filmic deployment of shoegaze wasn’t so exhaustive that it eclipsed the sound itself, but embodied it. If there is any discernible ‘spirit’ of shoegaze, aside from its stylistic hallmarks—wall of sound, undermixed and ethereal vocals, various effects—it is the solipsism of an angsty, idealistic teenager. Shoegaze’s harsh sounds perfectly encapsulates the torrential emotional changes of adolescence, an abrasive reality that only frays the edges of a dream still intact, that longing for something more, something meaningful and fantastic as yet out of reach. It is the maladaptive daydreaming-prone younger sister of grunge’s rageful nihilism and emo’s depressive wallowing. Araki captures that essence perfectly in his films, from the fugues of 2004’s Mysterious Skin to the surreal adventures of 1997’s Nowhere. Now, the edits of Araki’s films are a kind of emotional and aesthetic simulacra of that sonic essence. The semantic difference between what constitutes something as shoegazey is no longer dependent on what originally gave it its name—a journalist making fun of musicians for looking at their shoes as they pumped life into the pedals that gave shoegaze its distinct distortion. Outfits, moods, images have all become free game.

The downsides of this cultural obsession are also its benefits. Just seven years ago, it seemed inconceivable that icons like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, or Drop Nineteens would ever tour. I’ve now seen Drop Nineteens, Slowdive twice, and if I didn’t want to go deaf, I’d have listened to less full-volume MBV in high school so I could see them, too. Legends aside, all the new variations on shoegaze are abundantly cool—I’m no genre purist. The “Zoomergazers” from Jane Remover to quannic’s 2022 kenopsia, or Parannoul’s 2021 To See the Next Part of the Dream, meld shoegaze, electronic, emo, and modern production gimmicks with an excitingly hyper-rock bend. In some ways, these new sub-subgenres from “countrygaze” to “Zoomergaze” suggest that shoegaze as a musical genre is actually becoming more defined, more attuned to nuance, even as it is publicly misattributed. There wasn’t ever much sonic consistency to corral the acts in each of shoegaze’s three major waves in the first place—they seem only connected by time period and the increasingly open ways the sound has been manipulated. Just as shoegaze had its golden era in the ’90s—though it technically emerged in the late ’80s—the 2000s ushered in a new era. The second wave of shoegaze, often referred to as “nugaze,” came roughly around the mid 2000s to 2010s. Subgenres emerged then, too. Alcest and Sunbather had their moments as “blackgaze” bands. The Stargazer Lillies, Ringo Deathstarr, and Melody’s Echo Chamber took early iterations of “psychgaze” to new highs. Candy Claws infused psychgaze with dream pop, and Beach House would bring the sound increasingly into the mainstream. Sweet Trip’s 2004 velocity : design : comfort was a totally unprecedented blend of ambient, electronic, DnB, and shoegaze. It might all just as well be “post-genre.”

But a scene from this period still remains surprisingly undiscussed—Japanese Shoegaze. It was a relatively small subgenre. The earliest bands started releasing around the late ’90s, iconic albums, like Coaltar of the Deepers’ 1998 Submerge and Supercar’s 1998 Three Out Change!! Throughout the early 2000s, bands like Luminous Orange, Pasteboard, Tokyo Shoegazer, and cryuff in the bedroom continued to evolve the sound. But nothing, classic or modern, compares to the idiosyncratic sound of Kinoko Teikoku.

Kinoko Teikoku, which translates to “Mushroom Empire,” was formed in 2007, comprising Sato Chiaki on vocals and guitar, A-chan on the guitar and keyboards, Shigeaki Taniguchi on the bass, and Kon Nishimura on drums. The band’s first album, 2012’s Uzu ni Naru (渦になる) didn’t make much of a splash, despite the incredible elemental fury of its sound. The title roughly translates to “to become a whirlpool” or “to swirl,” and throughout the album they manipulate distortion and momentum to make the sound feel like roaring white water. There are epic slow-builds, like “Whirlpool,” where shrill, stadium-rock-esque guitar riffs pierce through a swirling wall of noise. Or the 8-minute “Taikutsushinogi” which lurches from loud to Sato’s featherweight vocals, accompanied only by a thin beat and spindly fret noises, before revving back up even louder, as if falling off the edge of a waterfall while screaming. The other 8-minute track, “Ashikubi,” is less undulating and more a steadily rising current into total sonic decimation. The peppy tracks “School Fiction” and “Girl Meets Number Girl” could easily catapult into anime-soundtrack fame, with catchy choruses and earworm riffs.

Kinoko Teikoku would alchemize the raw components of their style in their 2013 sophomore album, Eureka, into something entirely unparalleled by any other shoegaze sound. Sato opens “Yodaka” chanting as if casting a spell—really, she is singing about how existence can be excruciating when we must kill to survive. The reverb in the latter half of the song rumbles like tectonic plates opening onto a reservoir of oil, shimmering mysteriously in iridescent blackness. On “Harutoshura” Sato’s syncopated lyricism has a gusto against jagged guitar riffs that sound like alarms. “Kokudouslope” is a catchy thrasher full of angst and freedom with its octangular chord progression and cathartic shouting. It was the anthem of my teenage years and still feels like bodies in a mosh pit, jumping and slamming against you, complete abandon and recklessness. “Eureka” is one of their best and most original songs, its walls of anarchic disorientation and syncopated industrial noise like a chaotic breach at the containment facility for some supernatural beast. Sato plays on her spellbinding whisper in the beginning, before transitioning into a sustained shout as filled with longing as Hayley Williams in “All I Wanted.” The near 9-minute “Musician” is the band’s greatest opus, a true monument in the annals of shoegaze history. The last 2 minutes have a rapturous beauty—guitar riffs wailing gloriously, comets raining from the sky, the land and sea trembling. It’s a kind of sublime bliss that comes only on the verge of annihilation. Throughout Eureka, all the elements of Kinoko Teikoku’s sound are magnified: the slow-builds become seismic, the fragility of Sato’s voice that much more anguished, the tone as enigmatically piercing as the pastel rainbow eye nearly scrawled out by black scribbles on its cover. You don’t have to speak Japanese to understand the feelings of existential dread and euphoria that Sato sings; they are transmitted by melodic osmosis.

Released only months after Eureka, the Long Goodbye EP signalled a turning point for the band. By 2014, as they rose in popularity, they adopted a straightforward J-rock sound, losing almost completely any traces of shoegaze. On the highlight “Flower Girl,” they go out guns blazing—the gentle, hypnotic repetition of  “Flower Girl” sliding into a gargantuan wall of noise. Its title seems, in retrospect, to signal farewell to their beloved genre. Then, in 2018 they would disband. Bassist Taniguchi took on a role at his family’s Buddhist temple, and rather than find a new member, they opted to explore their own paths. You can hear elements of the sound they pioneered in some shoegaze acts that would emerge later throughout the 2010s like Yugari’s 2016 EP Nightlife. But for the most part, their brilliance was self-contained and entirely unreplicable.

Only Kinoko Teikoku’s earliest three projects are truly shoegaze. They stand as relics of a short-lived period when the band created some of the most prodigious music of the genre, regardless of era or style. If in writing this I send them to their cultural death-in-revival, then let this also be a plea. Kinoko Teikoku: please get back together and tour the U.S. and play the two greatest Japanese shoegaze albums of all time.