Worth the wait.

Review Score:

A

April 9th / 2025 –

About damn time. Tsubi Club is a musical hermit. They’re more cryptid than artist – something you spot between trees in the deepest part of Appalachia. Probably best known for their work with Aries, tsubi is Soren – a hyperpop vocalist, DJ, and producer who’s been lurking around the outskirts of the scene for years now. With just a few singles under his belt, Tsubi Club still had built quite a following, especially given his sparse catalogue.

Hyperpop, a genre declared dead by some, did seem to have hit its peak at the height of the pandemic with the 100 gecs of it all. But tsubi club’s debut album trinket says otherwise. It’s bright, punchy, and painstakingly produced. It has just twelve tracks and a sub-thirty minute runtime, but TC makes each moment count. There’s no downtime, but it doesn’t exhaust you – a difficult line to walk in a genre built on noise and, to some extent, shock value.

The album is loaded from front to back with bangers. The hooks are what the kids call “sicko mode”, but it’s the interstitials that elevate the project for me. It’s commonplace in hyperpop and electronic music to name a song some assembly of characters that forms a cat face or something. But no song on trinket feels like the “cat emoticon” of the album. Everything, every moment, is always on the edge of busting wide open and flooding your ears. Just filling your ears with music goo. Dripping out down the sides of your head and all over your shirt and pants. That’s what this is like. It’s like goo. I don’t know. Jesus.

Good album.

Review Score:

A

Gubb wrote this review. You can’t get mad at Gubb.