Joji

When I first wrote about Joji on this show I was working off three studio albums, a £3.50 headset with one working earpiece, and a brand new single called Glimpse of Us that I was deliberately steering around because it felt too easy to pick. Couple of things have changed since. Not to mention I had fucking fancy tickets to Him and Lil Toe in August a few years ago, but had to go to a wedding instead - gutted.

Joji released SMITHEREENS two months after that Ditty episode aired. Glimpse of Us was on it and turned into the biggest single of his career. The rest of the album was nine tracks, twenty-five minutes, half-of-it-piano-and-half-of-it-broken energy, and it became, very quickly, my favourite Joji album. I was prepared for SMITHEREENS to be the comedown record. I was wrong about that. It's the most concentrated thing he's ever made.

Then he disappeared.

Three years of nothing. He left 88rising. Set up his own label called Palace Creek. Started using a body double called Robert Birdsall, who fans named "Joe G", in his press shoots, his music videos, his promo interviews. There's a whole Genius lyric breakdown video where Joe G pretends to be Joji and explains the meaning of Pixelated Kisses with a straight face. I find this annoying. Joji has always done weird stuff (this is a man whose first character was Pink Guy, who specifically wrote songs about not being safe for work), so I shouldn't be surprised. Doesn't mean I have to enjoy it. The body double thing reads to me like an artist who isn't sure whether he wants to be looked at any more, which I am sympathetic to. I just don't think the bit lands as well as he thinks it lands.

But.

Piss in the Wind dropped on 6 February 2026. Twenty-one tracks. The first record on Palace Creek. I have the indie store coloured vinyl variant and I have played it a properly excessive number of times since release.

Quick history reset for anyone new. Japanese, raised in Osaka, came up on YouTube as Pink Guy and Dirty Frank, both viral and both extremely not safe for work. Pink Guy taught you how to swear in Japanese. Dirty Frank ran around doing pranks. Both characters had whole albums that, if you played them at work, would get you sacked.

In 2017 he retired both characters and started releasing under Joji. Same person. Different setting. Soft, raspy, melancholy, pop with the edges blurred. Most of it built in GarageBand on a Mac. In Tongues (Deluxe, 2018), BALLADS 1 (2018), Nectar (2020), SMITHEREENS (2022), and now Piss in the Wind. Five-album run.

I'm picking five tracks. Three from the back catalogue, two from the new record. And then on 25 August he's at Ziggo Dome on the Solaris Tour and I'm going.

The first seven seconds sound like a Nirvana track is starting. They are not. The vocals come in around 0:08 and they are quietly raspy, not strong, not trying to be strong, and exactly right.

40 seconds in: "I know you're not enough." Fair enough but very rude. Layers come in, the song starts stacking.

Then the bit I love. Around 0:50 he drops his voice on the single word Run, lets it fall, and brings it back up again. A whole emotional moment compressed into one syllable. I rewind that bit constantly.

There's a metronome-like tick in the background that I only caught when I put proper headphones on. Sounds like a closed hi-hat, set very low in the mix, keeping pace under everything. When you know it's there you cannot unhear it. (Garageband has every loop you could want for this kind of thing. He uses them like brushwork.)

This is the most-played track on Nectar, and I think that's because it's the easiest to slip into. Not the best representation of his range. For that, try Plastic Taste on In Tongues Deluxe, or Bitter Fuck, which we'll get to.

The most popular track on BALLADS 1 and the most "this is dreamland" intro on the whole catalogue.

The opening is so soft it almost sounds like the music in a video game when you're just walking around the map. Vocals come in around 17 seconds, very gentle: "I don't want a friend, I want my life in two."

1:41, there's a single woop! sound, just once. Worth catching. 2:35, a noise that I can only describe as the way you used to shake those handbells in primary school music lessons (very British, possibly only British, sorry to anyone else) when you were trying to make a sound without getting told off. One quick shoot and stop. Always once.

In the gap before he sings slow dancing in the dark there's a humming layer that softens the screechy register he hits when he's pushing the vocal. It rounds him off. Listen out for it on the second pass. 3:18, what sounds like distorted police sirens come into the back of the mix. He puts more sirens in. Nobody asked. Why not.

He builds and builds layers on the outro instead of stripping them out, which is unusual. Most singers fade. He stacks. By the end you've got more going on than you did at the start.

If you have ever been hurt by someone, this is the track. The opening reminds me of a Radiohead song. Slow, you know exactly what you're in for, you brace.

"They call me a bitter fuck because of you, because of you."

That's it. That's the song. He admits it, he blames you for it, he goes round again. The track is super simple, but underneath the guitar there's something that sounds like distorted rain or running water, plus little scratch textures and atmospheric oddities all the way through. Strip out anything that wasn't an instrument and you'd be left with very little.

Around 1:48ish, he hits a section of multiple "don't fuck with me," and the background noise strips back, layer by layer, down to the bare last one. Then everything snaps back in: "I'm a bitter fuck."

There's a noise that sounds like scratching a tape, the kind of sound a needle makes if you bump it. Goes off every second or so. And that hi-hat thing again, very lightly, sitting under everything. He had three signature production moves by 2018 and he was already arranging entire songs around them. Man I fucking love this album.

So I steered around it in the original episode. I'm picking it up properly now, because SMITHEREENS turned out to be the album where he stripped almost all the production away and let the songs sit on a piano and a vocal and not much else, and Glimpse of Us is the one that taught everyone how to listen to him without the layers.

The song is simple in the way Slow Dancing in the Dark is not. Three chords. One vocal. A very quiet pad underneath. The lyric is about being with someone you love while thinking about someone you used to love, which is a thing nobody says out loud and almost everyone has done. He says it.

This was his first global Top 10 hit. It topped the Spotify Global 50. RIAA twice Platinum. The discourse afterwards was "is Joji going pop now," and the answer is no, he was always pop, he just stopped hiding it for one record.

If SMITHEREENS passed you by because the back catalogue felt like the safer bet at the time, go and listen. It's twenty-five minutes. You will not regret the trip.

The new record landed on 6 February with the single Pixelated Kisses leading. Listen to the opening four bars next to the opening of YEAH RIGHT from BALLADS 1. They are siblings. The James Mao-directed video deliberately nods back to the YEAH RIGHT visuals. He's signposting that the new record reaches for the lo-fi, melancholy half of his catalogue rather than the polished Nectar half, which I am personally extremely happy about.

Other places to land on Piss in the Wind: If It Only Gets Better for the acoustic-guitar-and-syncopated-bass mood. Past Won't Leave My Bed for the ballad register, although I agree with the early reviews that it doesn't cut as deep as some of his older slow songs (Bitter Fuck, frankly, still wins this category). Love You Less for the Steve Lacy-ish guitar tone. Last of a Dying Breed for the sample-heavy production. He is doing more genre-hopping inside one record than he has on any project to date, and the indie coloured vinyl I picked up holds twenty-one tracks of it.

The Joe G stuff still annoys me. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't. But the album's good and he's earned the right to do whatever weird thing he wants with the press cycle. They're separable for me.

Should add I am very partial to some Pink Guy shit, she’s so nice is top fucking tier.

25 August 2026. Tommy Richman supporting. The Solaris Tour is the first time he's playing anything from Piss in the Wind live, mixed in with everything else. I've been chasing one of his shows for a long time. I'll let you know what it was actually like once I have a comparison point.

Laters on a menjay.

Z