This week’s features include: 空白ごっこ (kuhakugokko), Harutya, whaledontsleep,
ラブリーサマーちゃん (lovely summer chan), sympathy, and クレナズム (culenasm)

Hello! And welcome back to yet another week of the Spotify J-Music Playlist Draft, Season 2! Those of you have been tuning in since the start would already know, but if in case you’re only now just picking up the series ー

The Draft, inspired by player drafts in traditional sports and draft formats from popular trading card games like Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh, is a bi-weekly series where we try to answer the question;

How good is Spotify at recommending songs to me ?

In this series I will test Spotify’s ability to recommend to me songs that I would like based on songs that I already do like in the form of my own ongoing Recommendation Roundup Playlist on Spotify.

Making use of Spotify’s built-in suggestion feature on user-created playlists, we will have it gather a total of 5 (five) songs for me to check out and listen to. In addition to my own playlist however, for this season we will ALSO be including the 100 Draft picks from the previous season into the mix, thus (in theory) refining Spotify’s recommendations even further while also ensuring that we don’t get any repeats (songs that weren’t picked from last season though will get another shot if they get recommended to me again). Songs that I like will get drafted on a *new* Draft playlist, where the goal is to see just how big it gets by the end of the year.

What else new in Season 2 of Draft, you might ask? Well, we will actually be introducing a couple more things that weren’t present in the previous season. The first, is what we will be calling the Score To Beat. Last time Spotify only needed to reach a 100 songs for it to get the W at the end of the year. We will treat that 100 as the *current* score to beat for the series, so for this season Spotify now needs to get 101 or higher before the end of the year in order for it to win.

To keep things fair however, seeing as Spotify juuuust barely reached its goal last year, we’ll be incorporating the Wait List; a separate playlist of songs (max 3) that I think I might reconsider drafting should it come down to it.

We are now in Week 4 of Drafts, which is still pretty early into our little contest here, but if Season 1 taught us anything, it’s that every song counts in this series so better bag those picks whenever you can if you’re Team Spotify.

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Let’s see how we’re looking this week:

Kuhakugokko, culenasm… What is this, the Roundu-

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♥ 雨/ame by 空白ごっこ (kuhakugokko)

Kuhakugokko is a very well-beloved group here on the blog, particularly for vocalist Setsuko’s distinctly powerful deliveries, and as evidenced by their multiple appearances on the Monthly Roundups over the years since I first came across them. Despite Ame being one of the first songs that really put them on people’s radars though, it was a track that I missed out on getting to feature when it came out. It gets a spot here on the Drafts at the very least as well as a rightful pick up from me.

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♥ きれいなものだけ/kireinamonodake by Harutya, whaledontsleep

whaledontsleep makes their *third* consecutive appearance here on the Drafts (a first here on this series), this time around with yet another one of their produced tracks and with Harutya on vocals. He does his best Yakousei impression here in Kireinamonodake and, well, the play counts alone should probably be enough to tell you how good of an attempt this was at it. The trick with these kinds of tracks really is to just keep it short and sweet, which this song was able to do (getting it done at well under 3 minutes) so yeah, well done whaledontsleep and congrats on the first hat trick of the series.

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x 私の好きなもの/watashi no suki na mono
by ラブリーサマーちゃん (lovely summer chan)

First and foremost, allow me to acknowledge that Lovely Summer Chan is an absolute legend, and I’d be remiss to not at least mention that as she now makes her first appearance here on the blog. Now, that being said however, I do personally find that she does a lot of her best work collaborating with other artists, particularly as of late now that she’s come into her own as an artist. In contrast, one of her earliest works in Watashi no Suki na Mono here does admittedly leave a lot to be desired, with it just being a little too flat for my liking.

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♥ ドロップキック・ミッドタウン/dropkick mid-town by sympathy

While the golden age of Japanese Girls Rock is long far gone, it does feel like we’re nearing a renaissance of sorts with more and more all-female bands slowly starting to come back out of the woodwork. One such band is sympathy here who, despite already showing immense promise back in 2017-2018 with tracks like Dropkick Mid-town here, put their music careers on hold amidst the global pandemic. They never formally hung up their guitar straps though and they even have a live show lined up next month. Exciting times ahead for both the band and Girls Rock as whole.

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♥ 秒夏/byounatsu by クレナズム (culenasm)

The duality of culenasm being equal parts Shoegaze and Yakousei-like will never not be a point of interest for me whenever I get to talk about the band’s music, specifically their earlier works like Byounatsu here. Whether it’s born more out of a strategic choice given how popular that style of music is (especially around the time this song came out) or a creative one stemming from the band themselves being a fan of Yakousei is beyond me, but theirs is a fascinating take on the genre regardless.

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This Week’s Total Likes:

♥ ♥ x ♥ ♥

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The S2 Draft playlist on Spotify has now been updated with this week’s picks 😉

Another 4 ♥ week for Spotify. Doesn’t really get any better than that apart of course from just a perfect 5 pick week which to be fair only happened a third of the time last season.

Season 2’s off to a relatively decent start, albeit trending just a little bit below last year (though I guess we’d be just about even if we include our one Wait List track, funnily enough). Regardless, it’s still too early to tell how things will shape out from here.

What did you guys think of this week’s Draft? Lemme know in the comments if you would’ve picked up Lovely Summer Chan’s Watashi na Suki na Mono. Make a strong enough case and it *just* might make it on the Wait List 😛

Thanks for tuning in; hope to see you guys again in the February Roundup in a couple of days 😀 Till then, Happy Listening!