REVIEW

The second album from Seattle-based dream pop duo Bubble Tea and Cigarettes.

Formed in New York in 2019 by Andi Wang and Kat (Ruinan Zhang), the duo is known for a mellow, dreamlike sound that weaves together influences from European film scores, Japanese music, and Brazilian styles such as bossa nova. Two years after their debut, this album once again blends warmth and tenderness with coolness and melancholy, resulting in a lush, intoxicating atmosphere.

The record opens with the lonely, waltz-like prelude of #1 “Dead Flowers,” which sets a tone of quiet isolation. It flows directly into #2 “Plane Crash,” a love song built around an obsessive and destructive fantasy—wanting to board the same plane and die together. A striking line about wanting to “destroy the world” for someone pushes the song into an extreme emotional register. Visually, the music video’s pastoral rural landscapes strongly recall All About Lily Chou-Chou, reinforcing the song’s sense of fragile intensity and adolescent longing.

Japanese cinema continues to surface as a clear reference point. On #7 “Swallowtail Butterfly,” both the title and the lyrics explicitly echo Swallowtail Butterfly, further underscoring the duo’s evident admiration for filmmaker Shunji Iwai. These references feel intentional rather than incidental, suggesting a deeper engagement with the emotional language and imagery of his films.

Among the highlights, #3 “Envelope” stands out for its immersive beauty. Airy synths drift beneath softly entwined male and female vocals, their intimacy recalling the hypnotic elegance of acts like Men I Trust. The closing track, #8 “Glider,” brings the album to a gentle yet devastating conclusion: warm and calm on the surface, but lyrically bittersweet, evoking an image of two people holding hands as they sink beneath the water in a world already brought to ruin.

The album title, “we should’ve killed each other,” can be read as a metaphor for an idea of “ultimate love” often depicted in classic narratives—where devotion and destruction become inseparable. Despite the high expectations set by their debut, this second album more than clears the bar, further solidifying Bubble Tea and Cigarettes’ position within contemporary dream pop.

It is also worth noting that Bubble Tea and Cigarettes have cited the Japanese band Lamp as one of their influences. The affinity is easy to trace: elements of Brazilian music, a shared emphasis on melody and softness, and the use of male–female twin vocals place the two acts on remarkably compatible ground. Given these overlaps, a future shared bill would feel not only natural but artistically coherent, and its realization would be a welcome development.