Listen to Perfume’s ‘Nebula Romance

To celebrate their 20th (25th? Z5th!?) anniversary, Perfume have an exhibition at Tokyonode called Disco-Graphy, which is centred around their visuals. There are lot of cool installations there for fans to interact with, such as a dancing shadow installation based on their Perfume Live [Polygon Wave] performance of “Macaroni” and an installation themed around their original DoCoMo performance of “Fusion”. And to coincide with this, Disco-Graphy has a hero song “Ima Ima Ima”—which will release officially on 20 September. But the song has surfaced online in full, following its first play on Perfume’s FM802 radio show—Next to You.

The airing of “Ima Ima Ima” was to coincide with the Mr. Mic Show installation at Disco-Graphy, which features the song, and to get ahead of a bunch of raggedy phone clips showing up on social media. Because despite there being strict rules for the Mr. Mic Show installation to not be filmed or recorded, people are still gonna film the damn thing. If Beyoncé and her adamantium NDAs couldn’t get people to not film her shimmying in a kitten heel for a concert in Dubai, then Perfume ain’t stopping a stan from recording on their phone.

I really like how “Ima Ima Ima” sounds. I think it captures the album title Nebula Romance nicely. And the more I listen to it, the more it reminds of Pussy Pam’s “Mondai Girl”.

“Ima Ima Ima” is in that same space voyage-like, “Cosmic Explorer”-esque vibe that “The Light” is, but it sounds more interesting because of the chord choices and progressions. And I like that there’s a bit of city pop edge to it. It sounds like an off cut from Capsule’s Metro Pulse. Which is not a terrible thing. I liked that album and actually wished a couple of songs from that album were given to Perfume.

It’s rare to hear a bunch of Perfume songs and get a sense of how their upcoming album might sound. But based on “Love Cloud”, “Sumikko Disco”, “The Light”, “Ima Ima Ima” and even “Moon” (despite it not featuring on Nebula Romance – Part 1), we can hear the album taking shape, and it’s clear the whole thing is going to follow on from Plasma and have a very 80s synth pop focused sound. I’m cool with Perfume’s sound sitting in 80s synth pop, as this has always been the foundation of Perfume’s sound since Perfume Complete Best and every before that. The 80s theming was a huge part of what defined Triangle, both musically and visually. JPN had an 80s kinda J-pop gloss. LEVEL3 also leaned into the 80s. The point at which Perfume’s sound went tits up is when the 80s stop being the anchor for it. And it’s weird that this happened on Cosmic Explorer, given that the album title and the sound you’d associate it with was SO 80s. And this factored massively into the tour book, which had the visual concept that the album shoulda had. But that’s a whole other post.

‘It wasn’t 80s’ isn’t the only reason why Cosmic Explorer and Future Pop weren’t great. But it did result in the albums coming off like Perfume didn’t have a sound—because it was different from what we associated them with. Even though LEVEL3 pushed Perfume’s sound into a more 90s space on occasion, the album still had a very 80s sound. And I think this is why Plasma felt like a return to form for many of us. The 80s was anchoring the sound again.

My only concern for Nebula Romance – Part 1, is that whilst no song Perfume has released from it has been bad, none of the songs has been exciting or so great that I’ve found myself playing any of them non-stop. And at this point, Nebula Romance – Part 1 could easily end up just being Plasma+ or Plasma Pulse, as opposed to its own thing. I still feel that Perfume’s sound and albums are in a period of course correction and catch-up, and that the songs are way too flat structurally. None of them seem to go anywhere. But let’s see how it pans out.

One dedicated fan has already learned the dance for “Ima Ima Ima” and posted it online—which made me realise that it was featured in the Perfume’s Disco-graphy announcement video posted at the start of August the whole entire time.

We’re in the Nebula Romance Cinematic Universe now.