red in tokyo feat. Jianbo
Ebi Soda

Ahead of their new album ‘frank dean and andrew’ Ebi Soda drop ‘red in tokyo’; a glitchy, growling, late-night bruiser, featuring Chinese-Vietnamese-British rapper Jianbo. Described by the band as “punk jazz drill”, Jianbo’s ferocious, distorted flows cut clean through snarling guitars and sludgy, drill-inflected drums. The release follows highly praised singles ‘bamboo’, ‘feely’, ‘when pluto was a planet and everything was cool’, and ‘milk in my console’.

‘red in tokyo’ was born in the dead of night, in what can only be described as “peak madness” at the mansion recording sessions. Running purely on creative fumes, the band jammed relentlessly for 45 minutes until a golden 16-bar window of wild brilliance emerged. Grimey, angular, and oddly elegant, the track drips with post-punk dissonance and no-wave sneer, driven by Hari-lee Evan’s bassline, which was tweaked to imitate a Japanese Koto after some mixing magic. Within hours of hearing the track, Jianbo had laid down vocals that swing with both grime and drill poise, crackling with distortion and Tokyo heat. The intensity is fitting, as Jianbo recalls a tense moment in Tokyo that left him “seeing red”:
“red in tokyo is about a brawl that broke out in a bathroom in a backstreet Tokyo nightclub, with my friends in Black Country, New Road – hours after watching them play a sell-out show in Shibuya. As soon as Ebi Soda played me that off-kilter melody and groove, I knew it would be the perfect canvas to convey the feeling of that night.”

The collaboration itself feels like a beautifully weird full circle. After catching wind of Jianbo’s track, Mongkok Madness, in late 2022, messages flew between the artists, fandoms were revealed, and the discovery that Jianbo had actually seen the band live at a scrappy Camberwell gig back in 2019 sealed the deal. Fast-forward to the mansion walls, where red in tokyo emerged as one of several wildcards from the sessions.