The 8 best City Pop tracks of all time
City Pop
Tokyo in its bubble years: session-perfect studio pop made for people with a new car and a coastal road, borrowing American funk, soft rock and disco and polishing them past anything the originals attempted.
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Mariya Takeuchi / Plastic Love
A woman announcing she will not fall in love again, over the most buoyant arrangement imaginable. Rediscovered by a YouTube algorithm thirty years later and now the genre's front door.
Tatsuro Yamashita / Ride on Time
Yamashita is the architect of the whole sound — arranger, producer, and the man stacking his own backing vocals twenty deep. This is the record that made him a household name at home.
Miki Matsubara / Mayonaka no Door / Stay With Me
Recorded when she was nineteen. The intro is four bars of pure confidence, and four decades on it did the same thing to streaming that Plastic Love did.
Anri / Windy Summer
Toshiki Kadomatsu's arrangement, and about as close as pop gets to a sensation of speed. Everything in city pop that is about a coast road is about this record.
Tatsuro Yamashita / Sparkle
The guitar figure that opens For You, and the most imitated four bars in Japanese pop. Nothing here is doing more than it needs to.
Taeko Ohnuki / Sunshower
Ohnuki came from Sugar Babe with Yamashita and went somewhere stranger — closer to Brazilian harmony and orchestral pop. The connoisseur's answer to the obvious picks.
Yellow Magic Orchestra / Rydeen
Not city pop and impossible to separate from it: the same studios, the same players, and a synthesiser future that the rest of the scene absorbed within a year.
Junko Ohashi / Telephone Number
Disco brass, a chorus built to be shouted, and a voice with more grit than the genre usually allows. City pop when it stops being wistful.