Osaka, Japan’s Hyper Gal are not your typical musical duo. Dispensing with guitar and bass (for the most part) their sound is built around the frenetic drumming of Kurumi Kadoya and hyped up vocals of Koharu Ishida. Their sound has drawn associations to no wave and punk, but for all the speed (and the sense that the music could descend into chaos if they pushed just a little harder), Hyper Gal have more strings to their bow.
Tomorrow will see the release of After Image (the duo’s follow up to their 2022 album Pure). Both albums are available via SKiN GRAFT Records—a great home for quirky, noisy punk and rock music. Building on their previous record, After Image makes even more use of synths to flesh out the sound, built around the drums and vocals. Time and again Kadoya and Ishida demonstrate how they are just as adept at soaking the listener in waves of shoegaze-type layers of drones and simple melodies, before leaping into the next explosion of hardcore, rapid fire beats and staccato vocal punctuations.
Three tracks from the album, “OVER FUSSY,” “dot dot dot,” and “OOPARTS” have already been released and today, thanks to SKiN GRAFT Records, you can enjoy an exclusive stream of the whole album right here.
Buy After Image from SKiN GRAFT Records
