Last August, the digital-age power-pop ensemble Anamanaguchi returned with a fourth album titled Anyway that blended their hyperactive video-game sound with the spirits of Urbana-set emo past, thanks in part to its recording at the storied American Football house. To hear the band discuss the recording process, they were just as inspired by spaces online (search engines: evidently the foundation of the band) as they were those IRL (stairs; evidently “storied” has a dual meaning). As fans begin to speculate about Anamanaguchi’s next chapter as they gear up to hit the road next week, the band is assuring us that it’ll be every bit as exciting as a balance of those two distinct sets of influences may have led us to believe.
Their new single “Yeah I Guess” opens with the energy of pop-punk as performed by Andrew W.K. before shrinking away into a passage more clearly defined by recent innovations in hyperpop. It’s an explosive listen, with co-frontman Peter Berkman citing the ’80s sci-fi novel series The Book of the New Sun as a primary influence for its lyrical philosophy. “[Gene] Wolfe’s series is set on earth a million years in the future,” he explains. “The sun is dying, and humanity is living in the decayed ruins of a former futuristic civilization—with artifacts taken at face value and repurposed for other uses. Unlike so many post-cataclysm stories about ‘bands of survivors,’ Wolfe avoids the ‘need to preserve civilization’ and presents a different challenge: that ‘civilization’ is something that can happen anywhere, anytime, if humanity is willing to understand the world and claim their own ground to make determining moral decisions that help them be responsible for place within it.
“The question Wolfe gets at is, What makes us human? Could we even relate to human beings so far removed from us in time? When I read it, it hit so hard at the heart of early discussions the band had back in even Dawn Metropolis days. We were really interested in the tension of ‘technological singularity’ back then, and now it’s played out in our own time in obvious ways—first with the internet and now artificial intelligence. So it’s fitting that now that the band can sing, this feeling of legitimate and intentional decisionmaking (which shaped our album Anyway) is what we’re singing about. Wolfe’s character goes from being ‘nobody’ (a torturer’s apprentice) to ‘the Autarch of Urth’—which, etymologically speaking, means only the ‘self-ruler.’ So if you’re nothing and you’re no one, can you rule your own self?”
Check out “Yeah I Guess” below, along with the band’s upcoming tour dates.
