REVIEW

The fifth album from San Francisco shoegaze band The Velvet Eclipse.

Formed by Haruka Sato, Yumiko Veil, and Celeste Sueki—also known for her work with The Misfortunate—the band continues to operate under a fully DIY framework, with members sharing responsibilities across songwriting, performance, and engineering.

While their previous album “Withering away in the Garden of Eden . . .” established a deeply dreamlike sonic texture, this new record pushes toward a more muscular and emotionally charged direction.

Dreamy clean-tone guitars and noisy distortion streak across the mix like meteors, driven forward by powerful drumming and a distinctly physical sense of momentum. The result feels like a fusion of emo and hardcore intensity wrapped in the shimmering glow of bands such as The Pains of Being Pure at Heart and Exlovers. Reflecting this shift in sound, the vocal balance also evolves—from Yumiko’s fragile whisper vocals toward Haruka’s more emotionally forceful delivery. Her ability to move fluidly between luminous clean singing and explosive screams gives the songs a striking dynamic range.

The artwork also mirrors this transformation. While retaining the floral garden composition of its predecessor, the blooming flowers have now turned into black lilies, suggesting a deliberately contrasting approach across both sound and visual aesthetics. Together, the two albums can almost be viewed as a conceptual diptych—what the writer informally refers to as the “Garden Duology.”

The lyrics are written bilingually in Japanese and English, creating a compelling contrast between themes of grief, death, loss, and regret and the fluid elegance of the English phrasing. A deep sense of melancholy runs through the melodies, leaving an impression akin to black flames consuming a flower garden in dramatic slow motion.

Nearly every track possesses the immediacy and emotional clarity of an anime opening theme. That sensibility likely stems from Celeste’s deep familiarity with Japanese anime, manga, video games, and visual kei acts such as Malice Mizer and Plastic Tree. By merging shoegaze, J-Rock, visual kei, anime song aesthetics, emo, and into a remarkably cohesive form, the album stands as a unique cultural hybrid born from Japanese and American musical exchange. It also feels poised to offer a new perspective on the current Japanese shoegaze landscape.

For listeners interested in fully understanding the intent behind this release, the previous album “Withering away in the Garden of Eden . . .” is also highly recommended. As a female-fronted shoegaze work, it remains an exceptionally accomplished record in its own right.