The Japanese House has shared her new single :) (SMILEY FACE), a track devoted to finding happiness.
The artist, aka Amber Bain, has shared the track ahead of a headline tour of the US with Maggie Rogers.
Speaking about :) The Japanese House explained, “Smiley Face is a song I wrote when I was very excited about talking to someone on a dating app. She lived in Detroit, and I was fantasising about flying to meet her. I was in a session at the time for someone else’s stuff, but I couldn’t help this song spilling out of me. Turns out I did buy the plane tickets and now we’re engaged.”
The new marks the first new music since Amber Bain’s second album In The End It Always Does landed last summer. That album took in a wealth of contradictions – beginnings and endings, obsession and mundanity, falling in love and falling apart. It was largely inspired by the events leading up to the album including Bain’s first time moving to Margate, being in a throuple and the slow dissolution of those relationships. “[These two people] were together for six years and I met them, and we all fell in love at the same time – and then one of them left,” Amber Bain explains. “It was a ridiculously exciting start to a relationship. It was this high; and then suddenly I’m in this really domestic thing, and it’s not like there was other stuff going on – it was lockdown.” The album came together just as that chapter in her life was falling apart, with each song almost acting as a snapshot in time.
The Japanese House will tour the US and Canada across July and August. The run includes sets at Lollapalooza and Osheaga Festival. She will return to the UK in late August for headline performances on the Festival Republic Stage at Reading and Leeds Festivals.
