Shunkan - Kamikaze Girl
- Samuel Stevens
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
After five long years, Marina Sakimoto returns as Shunkan with Kamikaze Girl, a record that feels like coming home after getting lost in the city, heart bruised, but not broken. It’s her first full-length since 2019, and it doesn’t just mark her return—it redefines it. Kamikaze Girl is both a reckoning and a resurrection, a stirring exploration of identity, longing, and emotional reconstruction set against the hazy backdrop of Los Angeles and Sakimoto’s ever-present duality.
Produced by Alex Newport (whose credits include Death Cab for Cutie and The Mountain Goats) in the spiritual stillness of Joshua Tree, Kamikaze Girl radiates a tension between fragility and fire. It opens with the brooding shimmer of “Hellbound,” a song that immediately establishes the album’s emotional stakes. “It’s a big thing coming,” Sakimoto warns, as reverb-soaked guitar lines stretch into the ether like neon memories. There's a sense of dreamlike disorientation, but her voice—sweet, pained, sure—cuts through the fog with surgical clarity. Think Lost in Translation if it had a guitar-heavy soundtrack.
The album’s sequencing feels purposeful, almost cinematic. “Sidekick” arrives like a montage of youthful misadventures—sharp hooks, jangly chords, and a sense of hope tinged with regret. Then there’s “Usual Suspects,” a chaotic anthem for overthinkers and lost souls. With a nod to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia's iconic red-string conspiracy meme, the song captures the messy spiral of self-examination with a balance of grit and grace. It’s perhaps the most viscerally “emo” track on the album, featuring distorted guitars and a cathartic chorus that feels like a scream into the void—or maybe into your steering wheel at midnight.
While Kamikaze Girl never shies away from darkness, there’s light peeking through every crack. “I Did My Part Today” and “Arm’s Length” are quieter, both in their own ways; they're meditative moments that show Sakimoto’s lyrical precision. Each word is weighted, each melody line carefully etched into a raw emotional canvas. “Prettier,” meanwhile, is a slow-burning five-minute-long standout that showcases her evolution—a song that starts with vulnerability and the song builds and builds before ending in a full-blown catharsis. It’s the sonic embodiment of reclaiming power through self-acceptance.
“Frogtown” and “Talk Is Cheap” conjure up lo-fi LA landscapes, with jagged riffs and a vocal delivery that vacillates between soft defiance and exhausted yearning; the latter is more subdued than the former. These two tracks don’t just sound like the city—they feel like it. There’s a sense of constant movement, constant searching. It's no surprise that Kamikaze Girl was born out of aimless nights wandering LA; you can hear the ache of displacement in every note.
The album's closing number, “Gilligan’s Island,” is beautifully ambiguous—melancholic and oddly comforting. It doesn’t resolve so much as it floats off into the dusk, leaving listeners with the sense that not all endings need answers. Sometimes, being caught in a moment is more enough.
With Kamikaze Girl, Shunkan doesn’t just deliver a comeback—she crafts a triumph of vulnerability and self-exploration. Sakimoto’s songwriting is intimate without being insular, her voice both delicate and commanding. The production is lush yet never overwrought, allowing the rawness of her themes—identity, memory, loss, desire—to breathe at their fullest extent. Kamikaze Girl is a record worth clutching to your chest. But more than that, it's a document of healing—messy, beautiful, and deeply human as it gets.
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