Alternative
Riot Season Records · 28 August 2026
The riskiest thing on the record is also the last, and it runs thirteen minutes and ten seconds: “Ai Vist Lo Lop”, a medieval Occitan traditional song that Hibushibire begin by honouring its pastoral shape, with an almost bare vocal reading, and end up turning into a ball of distortion that burns itself out. The melody stays intact from end to end, and all the transformation happens underneath it.
Four shorter pieces come first. “Minagoroshi Western” (6:57) ratchets up the tension with every turn on changchang’s taut, dry guitar, and “Daydream Rendezvous” (5:30) does precisely the opposite: the most relaxed thing the band have recorded, summer psych held up by Aoi Hama’s fills and Kohei Katsuma’s congas until a bluesy lead brings it back down. Tetsuji Toyoda’s bass is what keeps the record on the road throughout.
With thirty-seven minutes of album and thirteen of them in a single cut, the band’s new material comes to twenty-four minutes across four tracks, and one of them, “Invocation and Ritual Dance of the Electric Nonsense” (5:13), sounds like a shorter, less resolved take on what “Mandrake Oracle” and “Minagoroshi Western” already do.
It’s the fifth full-length from the Osaka quartet for Riot Season, the English label that also puts out Acid Mothers Temple, and the second since Kohei Katsuma joined as a full member; it lands ten months after “Flashback Stonehenge” (October 2025). It came out on 28 August.
Rating: 7.5/10
Text by Marçal Bonastre