Fujiya & Miyagi Share ‘Point 33 Recurring’ Ahead Of New Album ‘New Shiny Object’

Four years is a long gap by Fujiya & Miyagi’s standards, most of it spent at their own studio in Newhaven with the final vocals wrapped up at Church Road Studios in Hove alongside Julian Tardo of 4AD’s Insides. ‘New Shiny Object’ runs to nine tracks – ‘Lowest Common Denominator’, ‘Point 33 Recurring’, ‘158’, ‘Elasticated Waste’, ‘Simple Pleasures’, ‘No Green Light’, ‘Yakult Classics’, ‘New Shiny Object’ and ‘Manufacturing Delays’ – and it’s the band’s first album since ‘Transparent Things’ turned them into a genuine, touring, advert-soundtracking concern two decades ago.

New single ‘Point 33 Recurring’ is out today, its video riffing on Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans Europe Express’ sleeve and David Byrne’s dancing, its twinkling synth line doing something similar to Talking Heads’ ‘Once In A Lifetime’. David Best on what it’s actually about: “based on the idea of how a song’s success… is predominantly based on its popularity or monetary achievements, rather than its artistic value. It’s about the devaluation of art and what it takes to navigate this.” It follows opener ‘Lowest Common Denominator’, already picked up by Spotify’s New Music Friday UK & Ireland and Les Inrocks, and filed by Stereogum as “a post-punk heater.” Best’s own take on that one is blunter: “This one’s not that deep… Its main aim is to make people dance which I think is as valid reason as any other for a song to exist.”