The unmaking of Friday Night Plans

What the hell happened to Friday Night Plans? When she first appeared in the late 2010s, the Tokyo-based singer (who just goes by her first name, Masumi) seemed like a notable new exponent of the sleek, R&B-inflected sound that had emerged in the wake of the city pop revival earlier that decade, typified by artists such as Wonk, Iri and Sirup.

Her 2018 cover version of Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love” (over 28 million YouTube views and counting) was so assured that it got a thumbs-up from the song’s creator. “Honda,” released the following year, even managed to make product placement sound cool. Masumi’s nonchalant bilingual vocals and preference for appearing with her face partially obscured only added to the mystique.

Then it all went wonky, in the best possible way. In 2021, she linked up with producer Ena — better known for abstract techno and bass music — and turned away from the mainstream, entering a shadow world informed by experimental and ambient sounds.

On “Embers,” the first in a series of EPs, Masumi’s vocals — often pitch-shifted or drenched in echo — were plunged into smeared, amorphous soundscapes, like FKA twigs lost in a dense fog. Far from an isolated experiment, it became the blueprint for a growing body of work that’s drifted ever further from the J-pop firmament.

“I wasn’t prepared,” Masumi says of her initial brush with fame, which came after her Instagram videos caught the attention of Grammy-nominated producer starRo, leading to 2017 single “Maybe.” “I was still in the process of figuring out who I was, both personally and as an artist.”

We meet at a coffee shop in Kunitachi, on the suburban fringes of western Tokyo. Every Wednesday, Masumi takes a train from her home on the opposite side of the city to meet Ena (real name Yu Asaeda) at his studio there.

They’ve kept up this routine for a couple of years now. Prior to that, they used to convene at a studio belonging to mastering engineer Tamotsu Suwanai, better known as Wax Alchemy, where they recorded all their music up to 2023’s digital-only “Visitors” album.

“When I first started working with Ena, I didn’t want the vocals to be the main focus,” Masumi says. “I felt like I wanted their presence to be on the same level as the rest of the instrumentation.”

Since 2021, Friday Night Plans has been working with producer Ena to explore a new kind of musical landscape characterized by experimental and ambient sounds.

The pair was introduced by Suwanai after Masumi expressed an interest in venturing beyond the boundaries of pop. One key inspiration was Finnish experimental electronic duo Pan Sonic, whose music she had discovered via the soundtrack to Felix van Groeningen’s 2018 addiction drama “Beautiful Boy.”

“When I mentioned them, Ena was kind of like, ‘OK, this should work,’” she recalls. (Asaeda turned out to have been an acquaintance of one of Pan Sonic’s members, the late Mika Vainio.)

Masumi describes the working process they’ve developed since then as a “kind of improvisatory, session style.”

“It’s pretty loose,” adds Asaeda. “If you overthink things, it’s going to end up sounding that way.”

Masumi’s new album “Blue Hour,” released in May by Barcelona label Modern Obscure Music, marks another evolution in the Friday Night Plans sound. Whereas “Visitors” and the preceding EPs made extensive use of field recordings and dubplates (one-off acetate records) cut at Suwanai’s studio, this time Masumi and Asaeda worked with a palette consisting mainly of vocals and acoustic guitar, plus a ton of effects pedals.

The resulting music still sounds deeply weird, at times recalling the most strung-out moments of My Bloody Valentine, Flying Saucer Attack and Cocteau Twins, but with a somnambulant Aaliyah on vocals.

Asaeda says there were a lot of “lucky accidents” during the recording process. A low drone of microphone noise runs through several songs. Masumi gleefully explains that the rhythm on the title track was created from the noise of Asaeda’s chair creaking.

“There are sounds that just work, even if they probably wouldn’t be allowed in a pop music context,” she says.

Noting that their collaboration started during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asaeda says they’ve retained the ethos of the lockdown era, when even major artists were putting out “more DIY-type stuff.”

“There was a lot of it around, and it was way better than the more finessed releases,” he says, expressing distaste for music that feels “too plasticky, too much like a product.”

Some big-name pop artists have recently been learning to embrace imperfection. Toward the end of our conversation, we get talking about Justin Bieber, who Wikipedia has informed me was one of Masumi’s early inspirations.

Speaking about the Canadian star’s stripped-back headlining set at this year’s Coachella (“It’s a huge stage … but he was able to create an environment that he felt comfortable in”) and his 2025 “Swag” album, she uses similar language when describing her own music.

“The production leaves some breathing space,” she says of Bieber’s recent material. “It isn’t too polished.”

Although Masumi still occasionally does the pop star thing herself, her infrequent live shows more often wrong-foot expectations about how a singer should function onstage. At the Mutek JP festival in Tokyo in 2023, she sat in an armchair beside a screen playing visuals by director Leo Iizuka that ranged from dreamlike abstraction to found footage. 

“I don’t really like to be stood out front,” she says. Rather, she wants the sound, visuals and herself to be on an equal footing, “coming together to create a complete whole.”

A performance at Shinjuku’s WPU Hotel in May took this to the extreme. Masumi stood behind a screen on which Iizuka projected home movies of a Japanese girl growing up in Mexico, which appeared to date from the 1990s. But here’s the kicker: It was someone else’s childhood we were watching, subverting the confessional mode favored by many pop artists.

“Even though it’s an unfamiliar location, with unfamiliar memories and people, I think there are moments when everyone will recognize something of themselves,” Masumi says. The videos, like her (often indistinct) lyrics, can’t be pinned down to a single meaning.

“Even when I try to explain it, it all sounds so vague!” she exclaims.

Maybe, but that’s part of the allure.

[bio]Friday Night Plans will have an album release party in Tokyo on Oct. 22. For more information, visit wallwall.tokyo/schedule.[bio]