On VOL II: KURATA, HINABI treats romance not as destiny but as a practice, and she is building a band to make that difference audible as cinematic pop-rock.
There can be something faintly embarrassing about saying that you believe in true love.
People are more comfortable talking about attachment styles. Dating apps have taught people to treat romantic possibilities as abundant. Therapy culture has given them precise language for why two people may be wrong for one another. Somewhere along the way, an earnest belief in lasting and true love became associated with naïveté.
HINABI does not appear particularly troubled by this.
An Album Made For Love
She is an artist through and through: vocalist, composer, author. At the centre of her forthcoming debut, VOL II: KURATA, is an unapologetic belief that two people may find one another and build something capable of lasting a lifetime.
The important word is build.
People enter love already formed by other things: childhood, disappointment, previous relationships, ambition, fear. Meeting somebody does not make those things disappear.
It exposes them.
That idea is the architecture of VOL II: KURATA, a journey towards finding and, eventually, arriving at true love.
Finding somebody is romantic.
Arriving together is work.
The Importance of the Band
What makes the record interesting is that HINABI is not leaving that distinction to the lyrics. It is being written into dynamics, arrangement and production, into the sound itself.
The music moves between intimacy and scale: a vocal that feels almost privately addressed, before drums, melodic bass, guitars and larger arrangements open the room. Restraint matters because release must be earned. Silence matters because eventually something has to interrupt it.
The band that gives those ideas a body is leanly cast. Drummer and band leader Dylan Youles claims ICMP First Class Honours and he typically favors hybrid pads, triggers, and SPD-SX. Bassist Kaye Syposz is a Mike Lull artist whose role is melodic rather than merely foundational. Together, they make up HINA.BAND. They are her band, and they lift every song. The story they are telling is hers.
Production comes from DK (Do Hyun Kim), the Los Angeles producer behind more than 190 K-pop, pop and EDM credits, with post-production and mastering by Stephen DeAcutis (Stevie D), the New Jersey engineer whose credits include Cyndi Lauper and Corey Glover.
Each instrument is doing narrative work for her.
A drum entrance can turn suppressed emotion into an event. A bass line can create longing without ever naming its object. A melody can know something before the character singing it does.
This, rather than sheer size, is what “cinematic” means in her description of the record. The sound has to take part in the story, so that the journey from separate lives through collision to the work of staying is something a listener hears in the shape of the songs as much as in their words.
But the centre remains the voice.
The Voice Carries the Message
HINABI is a vocalist and composer, and the gap between her singing and her personality is one of the project’s pleasures. There is little about her public manner (bright, bubbly, playful, occasionally almost disarmingly cute) that appears designed to announce a formidable vocalist.
When she sings, people start to reevaluate.
Cute does not preclude powerful. An artist does not need to dress as though she is about to produce an enormous vocal before producing one.
Even #FINDINGWOLFIE, her running search for the white guitar she calls WOLFIE, belongs to the same world: a joke about an instrument with a personality that is gradually entering the iconography, and eventually the sound, of the record.
Music is not her only language. KURATA LETTERS, a series of handwritten poetry, correspondence and spoken word she publishes on her socials, works through the same questions of longing, communication and emotional permanence. A thought too large for a lyric can become a poem; something too intimate for a chorus can become a letter.
And then the music can do what language cannot.
She is willing to wait. For a vocalist with an award already attached to her name, she is in little hurry to release music simply to prove that the voice exists. Songs are being rebuilt. Arrangements are being tested. The visual and literary worlds form alongside the record.
One could call this perfectionism. HINABI would probably call it patience, the same quality she assigns to love. Waiting does not mean doing nothing. Sometimes it is the period during which something becomes capable of lasting.
That is the proposition behind VOL II: KURATA. Not that true love exists because two people were destined to meet, but that, having met, they might decide to become capable of keeping it.
The record is being made on the same principle, and the band is being built around it.
Her wager, in love and in music, is that some things are worth the wait.
For commissioning purposes: HINABI is a vocalist and composer. VOL II: KURATA is unreleased; a private preview of one of the songs is being shared with a small number of publications.
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