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The Japanese House

“I know I shouldn’t need it but I want affection / I know I shouldn’t want it but I need attention, ”sings Amber Bain–AKA UK musician The Japanese House–on “Touching Yourself”, a sad and sexy pop-leaning earworm about desire and heartbreak. Much of second album In the End It Always Does is contradictory like this: beginnings and endings, obsession and mundanity, falling in love and falling apart. It’s the perfect circular portrait of a relationship–with others, with herself, with an experience–hence the simple, circular album cover.

Written during a creative burst at the end of 2021,In the End It Always Does is primarily inspired by the events preceding it–including Bain’s first time moving to Margate, being in a throuple and the slow dissolution of those relationships. “[These two people] were together for six years and I met them and then we all fell in love at the same time–and then one of them left,” Bain’s remembers. “It was a ridiculously exciting start to a relationship. It was this high… And then suddenly I’m in this really domestic thing, and it’s not like there was other stuff going on–it was lockdown.”