What a thing to wake up to:

My initial reaction was that we’d probably need to forget about voting for most of the Best of 2017 stuff, because this precious little gift could clean up like nobody’s business.

I know.

Anyway, “ribbon” is from the cocoon EP that’s coming out tomorrow, and between this and the other preview that we’ve heard from the record, how excited as hell are you? Like, I don’t always feel like what sora tob’s doing is particularly germane to the hallowed pages of Homicidols.com (just suggesting violence around those girls would probably make them faint), but a good rock song (even twee alt-rock!) is a good rock song, and that’s just how it goes.

If I have anything like a knock on the song, it’s that I don’t know if it realizes its ambitions as much as it thinks it does (see “tokyo sinewave” instead), and I’m not sure that’s it’s terribly faithful to some of its own conceits (like the off-kilter time signatures, for instance), but I barely care because it’s such a pretty result. It honestly sounds like a commercial for sora tob sakana; “If you need a combination of At the Drive-In and Belle & Sebastian in your life, sora tob sakana is the idol group for you!”

But yeah, song of the year? Video of the year? Album of the year? There have only been a couple of genuinely exciting releases so far in 2017, so I’m tempted to think that sora tob’s at the very least in the mix. They certainly did better on their first output of the year than agencymates Osaka Shunkashuto did.