The members of Cero have just finished recording their radio show, "Night Drifter," when I meet them at the InterFM897 studios in Tokyo's Shinagawa Ward. When I walk into the studio, one of the group immediately points out my T-shirt, which has an air-brushed depiction of a beach at sunset with the word "chillwave" spray-painted across it.
Chillwave was a style of music popular on music websites at the start of the decade, and one of many micro-genres that enjoyed the fleeting attention of indie music aficionados. The group's members list off a number of blogs, bands and buzzwords from the era, but the most striking thing about our conversation is that Cero, a band that has charted on Japan's painfully mainstream Oricon album charts, is incredibly knowledgeable about niche music cultures — a rarity among Oricon's usual acts. Then again, the band used to be one of those niche takuroku (bedroom recording) acts not too long ago.
"But now that we have the budget, we're slowly shifting our style," vocalist Shohei Takagi says. "Our latest album was inspired by R&B, soul and jazz, and I even rap a bit on it."