I’m definitely a latecomer to the vaporwave party – I didn’t really become aware of the genre until the middle of 2020. Lockdown gave me plenty of time to explore new music, and I took advantage of that in a big way.

As the days began to blur together and I started having trouble sleeping, I felt I had entered a waking liminal dream – moments were stretched and distorted, the atmosphere was heavy and stifling, and there was sort of a general sense of confusion and the need for a lightening of the load, so to speak.

Which is where our album for today comes in.

As I languished in the cold blue light of my TV screen in the wee hours of the morning, cycling between French dungeon synth and Pacific Northwest hippie drone, I stumbled across this absolute gem. I cannot overstate the way this album affected me at the time, and continues to do so to this very day. Meandering slowly between the type of music you might expect to hear in a 24/7 grocery store and the kind of pure, unadulterated, aching nostalgia that you feel down to your bones, it quickly took a hold on me and I found myself obsessed.

Years went by and I spent lots of time with this record, but where it truly tested me was during the passing of my sweet little dachshund, Dolores, in spring of 2022. She was an older gal anyway and had experienced some major health problems, so it wasn’t altogether unexpected, but it’s never easy. The last song I listened to with her before we let her go was a track from this album called “Cinnamon Chewing Gum.” I don’t typically recommend specific songs from a given album as I believe they should be taken as a whole cohesive piece of art, but in this instance, this track really does stand out. It gives me the same wistful agony in my heart as the music at the end of an anime episode after school when I was younger. A sense of something fading, something beautiful that you never knew how to appreciate until it disappeared.

The pain of losing my sweetest little sausage in the world caused me to take a break from Pink Soda for a while, as it was simply too excruciating. The music itself is already constructed to elicit certain vibes of longing – I could not handle it while missing my little nugget. That said, once enough time had passed and I was finally able to revisit it, I found the songs gave me more comfort than I had ever imagined. It’s only just now striking me how interesting it is that this music can basically be a sonic callback to an era of thriving malls, movie theaters, wistful childhood summers, etc., without sounding out of place in our current time.

I can’t say enough about how special this album is to me. If you’re into softer music with a certain emotional bent, don’t mind the occasional tear, and you’re looking for something to transport you to a space that may have never even existed, this is the record for you.

In addition, please enjoy this quote from the album’s Bandcamp page: “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes and, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love, 夏 and Japanese mysteries.” – Jack Kerouac