In July, Envy announced their new album Eunoia to follow their 2022 EP Seimei. The Japanese rock band released the lead single “Beyond The Raindrops,” and today they’re back with another invigorating preview titled “Whiteout.”

Japanese post-rock/hardcore/shoegazers Envy are planning to release their eighth album in October. Titled Eunoia, the project follows 2022’s Seimei and features a thunderous lead single, “Beyond The Raindrops,” which Envy have already shared on Bandcamp.

For decades, the Japanese band Envy has specialized in a heart-surging sound that doesn’t belong to any particular genre. Envy started out as a hardcore band before moving into a vast, expressive hybrid style that combined black metal scraggle-roar, shoegaze whoosh, and post-rock tingle. They’re often credited with inventing the blackgaze subgenre, but it seems like they did that entirely by accident. And while many bands have tried to adapt Envy’s style, nobody does it like Envy themselves. They’re still doing it, too.

Many years ago, the Japanese band Envy figured out a sound — a surging and tingly and muscular combination of shoegaze reach and post-rock tingle and hardcore muscle — that felt vast and epic and emotionally resonant. Thousands of bands followed their example, and Envy ended up inventing whole underground music subgenres almost accidentally. They went on to make music in those subgenres that was better than anything that their imitators could come up with. They kept doing it. They’re still doing it.

You’ve seen the memes. It’s only been five months and 2020 has already been a historical shitshow of a year. Thousands and thousands died while the rest of us slowly lost our minds in lockdown. And then, just as things finally seemed to be returning to some shattered semblance of normalcy, cities all over the world erupted in justified anger over the murder of black citizens at the hands of police. Remember early January when all we had to worry about was little stuff, like impeaching our president and nuclear war with Iran? Those were the days.

Nobody likes the second season of Friday Night Lights. On the scale of generally-acknowledged television failures, those 15 episodes have gone down in history somewhere between season five of The Wire and the extended death-rattle ending of Game Of Thrones. Friday Night Lights, which had been so grounded and moving and intensely emotional in its debut season, went all sensational and melodramatic and ridiculous. Matt Saracen hooks up with his grandmother’s nurse. Tim Riggins robs a drug dealer. Landry Clarke kills a guy. It’s all stupid. The mere fact that Friday Night Lights pulled out of that spiral and went on to become great again is some kind of miracle.

Within the macro tradition that is year-end list season, we at Stereogum have carved out our own micro tradition: Every December, instead of publishing a staff list of the year’s best tracks, we present a bunch of personally selected top-10 lists from our staffers and contributors. So although our rundown of 2019’s best albums represents a hard-argued consensus, the following collection of tunes is deeply personal. No songs are allowed to appear on more than one playlist, but otherwise anything goes. It just feels right to do it this way; think of it as a series of carefully curated mixtapes containing the songs that forged a deep connection with us this year. --Chris DeVille

Every week the Stereogum staff chooses the five best new songs of the week (the eligibility period begins and ends Thursdays right before midnight). This week's countdown is below, and you can listen to a playlist of all our 5 Best Songs on Spotify.

For the past quarter century, Tokyo's Envy have been one of the most important heavy bands on the planet. Since 1992, Envy have been combining post-hardcore, shoegaze, black metal, and tingly deep-breath ambience into one overwhelmingly beautiful and emotionally wracked whole. It's impossible to imagine bands like Deafheaven, Respire, or Harakiri For The Sky existing without them. And today, Envy have announced their first album in five years.

In early November, the Japanese post-hardcore band Envy released a two-song digital single titled Alnair In August. I wrote about the record when it came out, and I started off by saying this:

Please share your favorite "thank u, next" content in the comments below.

If you listen to heavy music circa now, you know Envy. Even if you've never actually listened to Envy, you've heard them. The Japanese post-hardcore band is almost singlehandedly responsible for the sound called blackgaze. Envy's progeny include countrymen Heaven In Her Arms, Denmark's Møl, Austria's Harakiri For The Sky, Ottawa's Unreqvited, Toronto's Respire, Australia's Woods Of Desolation, and California's Deafheaven, along with countless other bands across additional continents.

This summer, the Japanese post-hardcore greats Envy return with Atheist's Cornea, their first new album in five years. Last week, they shared the huge, gorgeous, immensely satisfying "Blue Moonlight," and they've already followed it up with another song that aims for the stars. "Footsteps In The Distance" opens with an oceanic guitar surge, mellows out into romantic guitar-hymn status, and then builds back into a colossus. It's a powerful piece of music, hard enough to make your neck snap but pretty enough to make you sigh as those vertebrae crack. Listen to it below.

You could probably make a case for a much different 5 Best Songs this week -- your parallel-universe list might include Tame Impala, Willow Smith, Elvis Depressedly, Vennart, and/or Moses Sumney. You would still end the week with a really good bunch of songs. It would be hard, though, to envision any 5 Best Songs this particular week that did not include the track at the very top of this list. However, if you went with the version of that song featuring Wale instead of the version of that song not featuring Wale, it would probably drop a couple spots. Why would you do that? No idea. Weird shit happens in parallel universes. In this universe, this is what you get.