I have no idea why I keep being surprised when EMPiRE does a thing right now. They have an album (on cassette!) to release! But no, I didn’t see this coming:

To pre-empt my own rising knee-jerk impulse to make little into something greater, I’ll refrain from too much commentary (you’re here for the music, anyway). Just:

• Dang, that’s some nice-ass songwriting — see, you can use familiar tropes in your work without making everything sound the same!
• That’s it for YUiNA, isn’t it?
• Individual chart ranks are meaningless without context, but the album made the daily #4 on Oricon, and I think it was #3 or something in the weekly (I saw something else and my brain went CONFLATE). Somebody nailed it.