Words: Garrin Faturrahman
Photo: Narendra Kameshwara/Joyland Festival

Being one of the openers for Joyland Festival Jakarta 2024 also put them into one of those that kept spirit and sonic honesty upmost in a set. Meet the four-piece indie rock outfit from Tokyo, DYGL. Give their tracks a go, and you might just have an Anton Ego moment, flashing you back to those Tumblr-stricken, Instagram-filter early 2010 days. Said scene might be made much more profound as their debut album, Say Goodbye to Memory Den (2014), was produced by The Strokes’ very own Gus Oberg and Albert Hammond Jr. at the helm.

During our talk with the band’s own Nobuki Akiyama (Vo./Gt.) and Yosuke Shimonaka (Gt.), we uncovered something more about that debut album production with the big names, their take on singing in English, and how they treat gigs as a band.

I first discovered your band years ago from the song “Let It Out,” and it came as a pleasant surprise knowing that you guys are from Japan, and even more of a surprise that the album was produced by Albert Hammond Jr. and Gus Oberg! That’s fairly star-studded, I feel, for your garage rock-driven first album. How did the deal come along?

Akiyama: Through a mutual friend. There’s this guy called Mr. Casca, one of our friends, and he has been working for The Strokes for many years in Japan. I forgot the exact role of his, but I think as a label manager or something.

So he knew this engineer called Gus Oberg, who at the time wanted to go to Japan and then wanted to work with a Japanese band. Gus just contacted him and asked, like, “can you introduce some Japanese bands to me?”

Conveniently, we also wanted to work with Gus Oberg first, because we had some lists of the producers that we wanted to work with—we have, like, 10 people or something. And then Gus Oberg was one of them. But we didn’t have any contact with any of them, so we just talked about it, like, what should we do? How should we contact them? How can we work with them? And then, weirdly, Gus contacted us. Like, first we were kind of surprised because he was part of our list, and then out of nowhere, he just called us. So we were just very happy and felt lucky to get the text from him.

So through Mr. Casca, we came to have a contact with Gus Oberg first, and then, Gus says: “it’s not just me this time,” like, he wants to work with another guy. That guy was Albert Hammond Jr.

But we were also kind of afraid to work with Albert Hammond Jr. first, because, like, you know, he’s a very successful guy, and then, if we work with him, eventually everyone’s gonna talk about Albert Hammond Jr. than us. We were like, ah… let’s see, we just wanted to work with Gus Oberg, and then not sure, like, we should work with Albert Hammond Jr. at this level, because, we’re a very new band, and then we don’t know, the personality of Albert, blah, blah… but we’ve been thinking and talking about it, and then we kind of thought that it’s great opportunity anyway. Not so many bands have an opportunity to work with the guy from The Strokes, you know? We then just decided to just jump in. Yeah, it was good. It was a great opportunity for us too.

Looking at you guys today, I’d feel the worry of being overshadowed by the guy from The Strokes has already diminished.

Akiyama: Yeah, like, we’re not really stuck in the same place anymore, like it’s just a first album, and then we’ve been trying so many things in each album. So yeah, it’s one of the aspects of DYGL, and we still appreciate it. We still love the first album, second, third, fourth, and then we already started to make something very new at the moment. So, yeah, we don’t really mind, like, you know, either way, like, we just appreciate it.

Your songs sound more Western than they are Japanese (with regards to the progression, melodies, and sound design). What shaped this creative direction of yours?

Akiyama: This is the question that we get asked the most—why do you sing in English? Like, why do you sound like an American or British band? Like, well, I don’t know… we just like the vibes of it. We just like the sound of it, but we don’t want to be Western, in a way.

I think rock music is a very open genre for everyone. Like, it’s not just for British people, and it’s not just for American people. It’s very open for everyone, and English as the language itself as well, like, it’s very open for everyone already. Like, you know, we are also speaking in English at the moment, without any Western people here. That’s what I think is the most impressive thing to me.

I don’t want to explain it too much because I didn’t really have many reasons for it. I just like the sound and vibes of the music, because I feel very free and open. And then I think I didn’t label it too Western. I still know it is a very Western-based music, and it’s still open, you know, compared to Japanese rock music, because it’s very domestic. Maybe I have some different reasons which I still didn’t recognize.

Shimonaka: I think we like music that is categorized in indie rock, and we respect the history of indie rock, and you just simply like it, so we just wanted to do it, and they are from Western countries, and they are written in English. So I think that’s why, simply, it’s one of the reasons.

It’s complicated. Sometimes I think I’m Japanese, but I sing in English, and it seems like in other countries, people expect us to do something very Japanese, but that is not what I wanted.

I read that your 2019 song, “Don’t You Wanna Dance in This Heaven?” voices dimensions regarding the urge to not stay silent in the face of oppression and for protest, primarily in the Japanese socioscape. Would you say your song helped people to be more vocal?

Akiyama: I don’t know, to be honest, like, I hope it affects people in a good way, somehow. But to be honest, I’m not really sure how it affects them. I’m just hoping for the good effects that it would have.

Speaking of the live house music scene in Japan, did DYGL also rise up the ranks in said live houses? What would be your story then from playing gigs there until being called as “Tokyo’s hottest new band” by NME?

Akiyama: We keep playing in the live house. We pretty much do everything all the time, like, doing festivals in Japan, then coming back to a local live house in Tokyo, then a big festival like Joyland. Then next month, we come to another local area to do some live house gigs somewhere like Kobe.

It’s not like a previous step and then next step or something like that. We always do things at the very same time.

So, yeah, it’s just a different experience to play at the festival, at the venue, play headlining shows, or play in some kind of booking events, and different style of the events has a different vibes too, for example, when in our headlining show, like our tour, everyone’s there supposed to be our own fans, so it could be very easily intimate with each others—they know the songs, and we recognize some of them even, and it could get very energetic at the very short moment.

But at some kind of a booking event with some different artists, with random audiences, it could be a good challenge for us to play some songs for new audiences. And then we play some festivals like this. Especially today, it’s the first time for us to play in an Indonesian festival, so it’s also a very different opportunity and experience for us to play. So I don’t think live house experiences are kind of ‘the first step, then next step is festivals’ like that. We always need aged experiences, you know? If we could be kind of Oasis big, we still want to play some local shows sometimes. It’s different, and we love it.

By the way, where were you guys playing yesterday?

Shimonaka: Bandung.

Did you guys have a taste of the Indonesian music scene?

Akiyama: Started to feel, yeah, but I did know Bedchamber.

Shimonaka: In 2017 we played with them in Jakarta, and recently, I found them releasing a split single with the band called Subsonic Eye from Singapore. It’s released in Japan, and I saw the news and I was happy to see it.