Haru Nemuri

Haru Nemuri (春ねむり, originally Haruna Kimishima) is an indie artist originally from Yokohama, whose music is a hybrid of indie rock, noise rock, art-pop and some electronic music mixed with rap. She takes these parts and builds something idiosyncratic with them: a kind of harsh, uptempo indie rock with a fierce edge that does not creep into punk, grunge, or metal, but still has palpable anger at its core. If anything, she is partial to light industrial type stomping beats and guitar bursts but smothers them underneath a thick layer of pop. Her vocals slide back and forth between singing and speak singing and rapping with a lot of fluidity. She flips J-pop on its head in a way, retaining some of its catchiness but using it as a wrapper for her own heavy point of view. Her music hits hard and it hits smart. She sings mostly in Japanese with some English slipped in on rare occasions.