Wielding little more than drums and a keyboard, Osaka-based duo HYPER GAL are waging a perpetual loudness war against themselves. Formed in the late 2010s, the band was inspired by the anarchic creativity of Japanese noise acts like Melt-Banana, Solmania, and Boredoms. But while their forebears deconstructed rock conventions, HYPER GAL’s primary influence is the glistening textures of pop. Their songwriting formula is bracingly simple: Kurumi Kadoya loops a keyboard phrase, pushing the volume until the melody grinds into a thick harmonic paste. Then she lays into the drums, heavy on the cymbals, while her bandmate Koharu Ishida half-sings and half-raps with a dreamy detachment.
The band’s 2021 debut album, Pure, which caught the attention of Chicago’s Skin Graft Records, relied on harsh distortion and eccentric mixing in the trebly vein of Wavves or Times New Viking. Since signing, they’ve hit the studio and polished their sound. To make up for the lost crunch, they now derive a compensatory aggression from more complex songwriting. On 2024’s After Image, this came in the form of rapid, dizzying arpeggios that sounded like Steve Reich scoring a circus. Their third album, Our Hyper, takes the opposite approach, dialing back the melodies in favor of hefty bass and gritty texture. Free-improv legend Taka Unami mixed and mastered the record, leading to HYPER GAL’s most conventionally well-produced record to date. But it’s also their most crushing, thanks to Unami’s ability to blur the lines between frenzied drum fills and dense bursts of fuzz.
Previous outings featured danceable beats, but Our Hyper is the band’s most explicitly clubby record. Migrating into lower octaves, Kadoya’s keys resemble sped-up acid basslines on tracks like “I do me” and “Fade Out,” locking into chunky triplets that keep her drum fills grounded in the rhythmic grid. On the former, Kadoya manipulates like she’s producing old school hardcore techno, manipulating the backing track’s pitch as she replicates the sound of deep-fried breakbeats and 909 kicks on her kit. The interplay between these two elements is tight despite the chaos: When the layers of synths dissolve, the drums ease, allowing you to gasp for air—then, they slam back with greater force. It’s the most punishing HYPER GAL’s music has ever been, not only thanks to the sharper production, but the attention to dynamics and movement in their performance.
Our Hyper is also the first HYPER GAL album to explore slower, sludgier songcraft, slotting breathing room into the track list. Opening with what sounds like a short-circuiting slot machine, “HAZY” trudges forth at a glacial pace, emphasizing the phantasmal noises (cybernetic whooping, wordless demon whispers) that emerge from the fuzz. It’s intense in a new way, casting a hypnotic, all-consuming spell that’s only broken by Ishida’s chanted vocals, which cut through like they’re broadcast via loudspeaker. “Mere Wisp” takes a similar rhythmic approach, starting off with a minimalist arrangement furnished only with a bass drum and a single, siren-like note that repeat unchanged for a full minute. It’s pure, overstimulating ecstasy when the tension finally breaks, as a chorus of bubbling arpeggios and bruised chords flood the space.
This widened focus and crisp fidelity bring out the dormant potential hidden in the eccentricity of Pure and After Image. Here, HYPER GAL is confident enough in their creative force to slow their pace or let ideas linger. Even when they’re not flooring the gas pedal, the music’s still manic, impassioned, and loud. As its title suggests, Our Hyper demonstrates the band’s ownership over the sound they’ve been exploring for nearly a decade, molding the chaos into controlled bursts of fury.
