MOTW: Haru Nemuri, Shunka Ryougen

Guess I’ll start blogging again. Expect these whenever.

Shunka Ryougen – Haru Nemuri

Haru Nemuri, the stage name of Haruna Kimishima, self-described “poetry rapper” delivered one of the most singular albums of 2022 thus far with her Shunka Ryougen, her first full album since 2018 (though punctuated with 2020’s heartfelt and crystalline EP Lovetheism). Shunka Ryougen at once sounds of apocalypse and rebirth, as on “Déconstruction.” The track begins with Kimishima’s breathless and heady poetics only to erupt into libidinal catharsis, “Deconstruct all, ratta wowowow,” a metropolitan skyline exploding at the end of the Fight Club she references earlier in the song (a reference that plays far better outside the sweaty halls of college dorms).

Kimishima’s music reflects deconstruction itself more strikingly than anything. Some songs have shades of j-pop, but Haru Nemuri is far more an art rock project, Kimishima throwing herself into performance with rattling abandon. On “Kick in the World (déconstructed),” she howls with more passion than most punks, sing-raps, (in translation) “There’re not any flowers in my secret garden/It’s filled with various precious stones, the color of which my mom cannot acknowledge,” with a mind sharp for metaphor somehow intangible and evocative and imperceptibly wistful.

There is a self-possessed earnestness in Haru Nemuri’s music, though that isn’t to say she’s humorless, just that she doesn’t affect the now-bland sneering irony of her contemporaries. Her anger erupts, her voice trembles with melancholy, yet through it all she insists on love. When she finally gushes, “how beautiful life is,” on “Ikiru,” you sense she’s earned it.