You could characterize the sound of For Tracy Hyde as cinematic, breathless, love-at-first-sight dream pop, with a seamless melding of influences from Shibuya-kei to shoegaze to grunge. But there’s something more difficult to describe at the heart of the young Tokyo band. Azusa Suga (alias Natsubot) serves as the band’s primary songwriter, lyricist, and guitarist, and his history colors the group’s latest record, Hotel Insomnia. Suga grew up in the States, and the specter of American suburbia lingers in the background of the record like a mirage. Previous albums Ethernity, New Young City, and he(r)art shimmered with nostalgia, but the collage of ’90s influences on Hotel Insomnia feels more connected to the past than ever before.
Beyond writing for and producing a large quantity of modern Japanese shoegaze—RAY, Dots, AprilBlue, and even pop artists like Niiyama Shiori—Suga’s hitmaking process has produced a decade of dense, captivating music under For Tracy Hyde. The band has built a reputation for twee jangle pop, but Hotel Insomnia leans further toward the grunge coarseness of bands like Catherine Wheel or Chapterhouse than the gauzier Pains of Being Pure at Heart. These influences lend a heavier, more opaque sound, partly ushered in by Ride’s Mark Gardener, who mastered the album. And in between Hotel Insomnia dense, exuberant wall-of-sound are interstitial spaces and things left unspoken. The characters never intersect at the right times; “Subway Station Revelation” breathes longing across a backdrop of an overstimulating, transitory subway station, while the love interest at the center of “Lungs” is defined by her namelessness. From the thoughtful whimsy of “Natalie” to the tremendous “Lungs” and “Estuary,” Hotel Insomnia has a restless yearning, a sense of wonder kicking like a fluttering heartbeat in the chest.
For Tracy Hyde’s ambitious, always nearly hour-long albums, have a tendency toward drifting in the third act. Here, the band’s focus unspools between “Friends,” its melody sweet but jejune and formulaic, and “House of Mirrors,” with an incongruous rapping section that marks it as the album’s most bizarre experiment. The longing, spirited vocals of Eureka, who joined the group in 2015, breathe life into tracks like “Estuary,” but she often capitulates to the instrumentals, like how her delivery melts too thinly into the chorus of “The First Time (Is the Last Time).” The record’s end, however, whirls back to life; “Milkshake” and “Subway Station Revelation” are among the best tracks of For Tracy Hyde’s career and standouts in modern shoegaze.
Other For Tracy Hyde releases were gorgeous concept records, coursing through cinematic stories; the otherworldly New Young City opens with a retro movie company jingle, and he(r)art’s cover is formatted like an enticing movie poster. After a decade of these narratives, however, Natsubot has grown tired of the band’s usual modus operandi, instead deciding to “create a playlist rather than a story” with Hotel Insomnia. But there’s no less effort put into For Tracy Hyde’s magic: Each song resides in its own world, individual and distinct both in image and sound. In Natsubot’s search for a world that no longer exists, these tracks race through hotel-hallway liminality—in mirrors, or the almost warm space someone once was. Its sound is dreamlike, but Hotel Insomnia feels clear and vivid.
