Formerly a member of Tokyo indie upstarts Your Romance, Shinji Miyauchi has found a kinship with nocturnal energy with his solo project Wu Mang – trading in new-wave theatrics for smoky, atmospheric R&B-tinged pop. Beginning with a series of slow-burning singles (Moon Gold Hair, Everyone’s Waiting For Someone), Miyauchi introduced himself as a singer-songwriter with a penchant for the romantic, blending 80s New Romantic styles with 2000s indie pop sensibilities. But this was largely hit or miss – with his tendencies towards overly cheesy stylistic choices rendering his music more akin to faded sonic wallpaper rather than anything romantically potent. With his new single Mirror, however, Miyachi injects his music with a groovy undercurrent, freeing him of the sense of overwrought melodrama that plagued his previous ballads.

Mirror’s lyrics tell a dejected tale of alienation, but its newfound electropop energy makes it an attention-arresting jump to the foreground. Musically, the result slots him in a realm not far from groove-based contemporaries gaining ground in the Japanese pop landscape, with the charge led by rising pop starlets like iri. Yet compared to his contemporaries that work in similar emotional realms, Mirror holds a reserved subtlety that allows it to function as a potent, nocturnal moodpiece. With his restrained delivery and deep voice, Miyauchi’s syllables slur into one another, and smeared with the woozy sonic backdrop that he crafts – sparse synth-pop flourishes of gated synths and filtered guitar stabs – Miyauchi’s tale obtains a introverted, opaque quality.

Within this entrancing sonic haze, there is always a sense of immediacy to Mirror’s progression. Driven by a skeletal, hard-hitting drum-machines and anchored by pulsating synth bass, the track never fades into the foreground, unlike his occasionally drifting former work, and without their contemporaries’ stylistic fixations (showmore’s jazz-pop pastiches, for example), the song progresses with effortless synergy. With no element seemingly overdone, the track builds and builds before the chorus explodes on the listener, replete with hypnotic vocal samples and funk guitar. The result is intoxicating.

“It’s as if we're all mirrors – anyone is,” he croons in the refrain. In a way, the track almost seems to reflect Miyauchi’s statement. In the track’s monochrome video, he stumbles up a slope in near-Sisyphean fashion - finding his way and falling again as he reaches his destination. Finally seeing the sun at the slope’s peak, he falls out of frame, and the track seems to end abruptly. But Mirror’s point seems not to be about waking up to the light - but rather the entrancing, reflective journey towards daybreak. Not unlike an endless night-drive, Mirror seems to invite us all to go on the road, to ride along with its own hypnotic loop. Effortlessly stylish.

Watch the gorgeous monochrome video for Wu Mang’s Mirror here:

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