REJAY treats headphones like armour in “Middle of the Night,” walking through Tokyo’s neon blur as if movement alone might outrun whatever keeps rising in her chest.
The track from her debut album Grown tag doesn’t announce its sadness. It dresses it up in synth-gloss and 80s shimmer, the kind that makes loneliness look cinematic.
For a 20-year-old from Niseko, Hokkaido, Tokyo represents both arrival and estrangement.
REJAY moved to the capital after her YouTube covers caught the attention of JQ from Nulbarich, trading small-town familiarity for the precise kind of anonymity this track chronicles.
Her Australian father’s eclectic music taste gave her the vocabulary, but it’s the displacement that gives “Middle of the Night” its particular weight.
She’s been writing since 13, yet this feels like the first time she’s admitted what the city actually costs.
There’s a specific type of ache in watching someone navigate a city at night, surrounded by thousands yet fundamentally unreachable.
Director Nathalie Scarlette captures this in the visual: REJAY on escalators, slipping through station crowds, her face lit intermittently by storefront glow.
The imagery recalls Sofia Coppola’s Tokyo (Lost in Translation), but where that film lingered on disconnection, REJAY is actively resisting it.
“I don’t wanna cry in the middle of the night,” she sings, but the fragility underneath suggests she already has.
The mic becomes her confessional, the one place where breaking down is permitted because it’s contained, controlled, transformed into something listenable.
What’s striking is how the bilingual structure creates two registers: the English lines make declarations while the Japanese sits underneath like subtext, what you’re thinking while saying something else.
It’s public language and private language happening simultaneously.
This isn’t fusion for aesthetic; it’s survival language. She sings “guess I breathe my soul through the mic to feel alive,” and the line lands not as metaphor but admission. The music isn’t therapy; it’s life support.
The 80s production framework creates a strange nostalgic remove. Those glassy synths, the gated reverb, the rhythmic pulse that never quite accelerates all work together as if the pain is already memory even as it’s happening.
REJAY’s voice does the same work, transparent enough to suggest vulnerability but controlled enough to maintain distance. You hear the ache; you don’t witness the collapse.
What “Middle of the Night” understands is that some people don’t fall apart in private.
They do it in public, with headphones on, performing normalcy while everything underneath shifts. The city doesn’t care. The crowd doesn’t notice. But the mic? The mic is always listening.
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