Romancing The Music introduces Hip-See-Kid as if they’d been hiding in a dust‑choked Shinjuku back room since 1981, quietly perfecting a sound that now lands fully formed. Produced under the guidance of jazz‑leaning New Wave minds (the project’s roots lie in a “jazzy new wave” vision associated with Kitayama Waka and Ken Yamazaki), the record plays like a delayed transmission from that parallel history, refracted through contemporary ears. Issued by Mawaru Recording as catalogue number MAW001, this mini‑LP arrives in multiple coloured‑vinyl configurations, but its real saturation is in the grooves: wiry guitar, elastic bass, nervy drums and synth flashes converging around songs that balance jagged edges with a sly, romantic undercurrent.

Across its seven tracks, Romancing The Music leans hard into the frisson between tightly drilled rhythm and emotional abrasion. “Flower’s War” bookends the record, opening and closing the sequence like two versions of the same feverish dream: one a taut, scene‑setting charge, the other a re‑entry that makes you realise how far the band has stretched the material in your head. In between, titles like “Nonsense of Folly,” “The Shortest Way to Love,” “Dance Freek,” “Dead Romantic” and “Marching Turkish” sketch out a fractured map of obsessions: infatuation and self‑sabotage, dancefloor escape, black humour in the face of heartbreak. Musically, the band hits a sweet spot where punk‑funk grit, clipped soul phrasing and scrappy jazz voicings knot together; bass and drums lock into grooves that are simple on the surface but full of off‑beat tugs and micro‑hesitations, while guitar and keyboards jab at the edges, pushing the songs toward slight dissonance without ever losing their hook.

What keeps the record from feeling like mere retro‑styling is its sense of personality and risk. Vocals tilt between deadpan and unhinged, sometimes riding the pocket like classic New Wave croon, sometimes lunging ahead of the beat as if trying to outrun their own sentimentality. The arrangements stay lean - no unnecessary overdubs, lots of open space where the rhythm section can breathe - which means every detail counts: a splash of chorus here, a stabbing horn‑like line from the synth there, a sudden stop‑start figure that briefly derails the momentum before dropping you back in twice as hard. The overall impression is of a band fascinated by the late‑70s/early‑80s Japanese underground - the zone where DIY pop, art‑school eccentricity and imported funk all collided - but determined to write actual songs rather than period‑correct exercises.