Shinsei Kamattechan

※This is a repost of an article originally published on March 14, 2022.

　Late at night, I always find myself wanting to listen to Shinsei Kamattechan, so I figured I'd write about them. That said, I'm hardly a dedicated fan—I never really follow bands as a whole, so I only know their most famous songs.

　When I first became aware of them, what stood out were their outrageous performances on the internet and television. My impression was simply, "They're a bunch of troublemakers trying to get famous through the internet." Nowadays that's become a perfectly ordinary path, but back then I remember thinking, "So they're trying to break into the mainstream from the internet, huh?" Because of that, I kept my distance. Ironically, I've now become someone trying to make that exact same journey myself. Looking back, those feelings were nothing more than petty self-loathing projected onto someone else. I saw the version of myself I wanted to become—and was frustrated that I couldn't. I couldn't even tell the difference between jealousy and disgust. How childish.

　Because of that, I'm sure there are plenty of young people today who look at me and think, "He sure knows how to game the internet." Unfortunately, I'd guess that nine times out of ten, that's just self-loathing too. You want to make something of yourself through subculture and otaku culture. You just don't know how, so you're stuck. Maybe one day you'll manage to transform that frustration into creative work. At any rate, hold onto that rebellious spirit.

　Anyway. The song that completely changed how I saw Shinsei Kamattechan was "Os-Uchūjin."

　As the opening theme for a light novel anime adaptation, it dramatically raised the resolution with which underground, mentally troubled internet culture could be expressed—a culture that hadn't yet entered the mainstream. It genuinely shocked me.　It felt like lightning—like radio waves—shooting straight through my brain. I'd never heard an anime song before that spoke so directly to the heart with such completely contemporary, all-or-nothing lyrics.

　I'm sure Shinsei Kamattechan had always been making music like this. But it was only after pairing that style with a cute-girl anime and the voice of a moe voice actress that it finally reached the ears of an idiot otaku like me. I surrendered. The boldness of words like "denpa" ("radio waves") and "telepathizing." The way a place that evokes psychiatric hospitals is reimagined as "the universe's waiting room." If an anime fan listened to this song and still refused to acknowledge Noko's sensibility, they were hopeless. In fact, I remember this being around the time the internet itself slowly began treating the band differently.

　The B-side, "Kotatsu kara Nagameru Sekai Chizu" ("A World Map Viewed from Under the Kotatsu"), is wonderful too.It cheerfully sings about the upside-down sleep schedules of shut-ins. Unlike the superficial "NEET jokes" that had become tiresome at the time, this song captured genuine moratorium—the real thing. You really do end up waking up at nine in the evening and going to bed at seven in the morning.

　After that I went back and listened to "Rock 'n' Roll wa Nariyamanai." That's when I realized Noko had always been writing with everything he had, simply turning the world he'd experienced into lyrics. Ango Sakaguchi once wrote that "Adults whom children love are those who understand loneliness." Back then, I mainly sensed that loneliness in Ōken's work. But I found the exact same loneliness in Noko.

　Later, at Hajime Isayama's personal request, Shinsei Kamattechan went on to create songs for Attack on Titan. "Yuugure no Tori" is extraordinary. Normally, when you're writing a song for something called Attack on Titan, you'd naturally go for something grand, dramatic, and overwhelming. Instead, Shinsei Kamattechan created an ending theme that was incredibly gentle and serene. It demonstrated a profound understanding of the series, and proved why Isayama regarded them so highly. It was one of those moments where you witness genuine talent.

　Then came "Boku no Sensō." By suddenly inserting Japanese into what initially sounds like a foreign language, the song conveys the feeling that war abruptly becomes something close and personal. As a theme song for the final arc of Attack on Titan, it's practically perfect. Around this point, I found myself becoming more interested in Shinsei Kamattechan's choruses than in their lyrics. Those vocal passages that almost stop functioning as language.

　Then came this year. At the beginning of the year, Isayama published one of his playlists. Among Shinsei Kamattechan's songs, he chose "Yozora no Mushi to Dokomademo." The song barely has any lyrics at all. It's simply Noko's gentle voice, fragile and echoing through the silence. It was exactly the sort of song I'd been searching for. By then, I'd reached the point where I could feel his loneliness and kindness even without words. That this song abandons language almost entirely moved me deeply. Even more than that, I felt genuine awe toward Isayama, who had understood this quality years before I ever did. I actually got goosebumps.

　Listening to Shinsei Kamattechan's masterpieces alone in a dark room late at night puts me in that mood. That mood where I suddenly end up writing an absurdly long post like this one. That's simply how large a presence they occupy in my life.

　But dawn is almost here. And mornings aren't my time. Don't wake me just yet. Right now, I'm sleeping in... because I'm a night owl.