The Japanese House shares her long-awaited second studio album In the End It Always Does via Dirty Hit. Featuring the acclaimed singles ‘One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones’, ‘Sunshine Baby’, ‘Sad to Breathe’ and ‘Boyhood’, the album marks her first full-length release since 2019’s Good at Falling and finds her sound and style characteristically wide open, her vulnerabilities, thoughts and innermost feelings stitched into a tapestry of gorgeous, elevated pop music.
In the End It Always Does also features the standout track ‘Touching Yourself’, a sad and sexy pop-leaning earworm that comes accompanied by the final video in Amber’s series of live sessions accompanying the album.
The Japanese House’s Amber Bain says of the album title: “It’s about falling in love and not wanting it to end but knowing it always does. I think a lot of people hear the title and think about it in an optimistic way but that’s not what I mean. I hear the title as sad because things always end, no matter what you think is going to happen but that can also be a positive thing because endings are just a change. It could be the end of a phase in a relationship or something else, it’s cyclical.”
In celebration of the release, The Japanese House has played her first full-band show since 2020 at XOYO in London before heading out on comprehensive UK & US headline tours through the year. Bain also supported The 1975 at their sold out Finsbury Park show over the weekend.
It’s been nearly a decade since Bain’s break-out in 2015, back when The Japanese House was a mysterious unidentified figure shrouded in mystery and reverb. These days though, Bain’s sound and style is characteristically wide open, her vulnerabilities, thoughts and innermost feelings stitched into a tapestry of gorgeous, elevated pop music.
Much of In the End It Always Does lives in the contradictory: beginnings and endings, obsession and mundanity, falling in love and falling apart. Written during a creative burst at the end of 2021, In the End It Always Does is primarily inspired by the events preceding it – 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 then we all fell in love at the same time – and then one of them left,” Bain’s remembers. “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.
Four years after her widely celebrated debut Good at Falling, this album sees Bain lean even further into the pop realm – with help from Matty Healy and George Daniel from The 1975, Katie Gavin from MUNA and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon among others. Bain credits Gavin especially with injecting her with creative energy and inspiration throughout.
The album also sees Bain work alongside producer and engineer Chloe Kraemer (Rex Orange County, Lava La Rue, Glass Animals), an experience she describes as “life changing” due to the unspoken, shared understanding between marginalised genders in a creative space. “I’d never worked with a woman or queer person [in that way] before,” Bain says. “It’s nice to have someone who completely understands your standpoint and shared experience. Also, I say ‘she’ in every song… so it’s important that someone understands that.”
The Japanese House is the acclaimed project of Amber Bain, who has released music under the pseudonym since 2015, and shared her debut album Good at Falling in 2019. Since her emergence in 2015, The Japanese House has received industry-wise acclaim from The Guardian (“feels like a refreshing splash of cold water on tear-stained cheeks”), Sunday Times Culture (“stunning”) Pitchfork, i-D, VICE, NME, GQ, Interview Magazine, BBC Radio 1 and more.
