Looking up Toriyama on Google was a failure: anime were filling the results page with heartfelt, tender goodbyes to Sangoku’s dad. Only clue left was the title of the song: “dead astronauts”. As Toriyama wrote themselves, the song is named after a sci-fi book written by Jeff VanderMeer. It tells a story about a female astronaut returning home after a space exploration mission, likely ashamed of not having found any new habitable planets. Can I say that Toriyama’s song is about exploring, coming back, and saying, “I didn’t find what I was searching for, I didn’t know where the call was coming from, so I came back home”? Toriyama wrote to us, “dead astronauts is the first single of my EP lola, written partly in a Warehouse and finished in a living room, capturing the raw, shifting spaces I inhabited.” As I listen to the song while I’m writing this, I can hear a soul going on a long trip and shapeshifting across space. The air seems full of smoke thanks to well-used effects, and the harmonic progression just makes you consider where you have been. And as the days are getting colder, the song might be everything you need right now, melancholy and a kind of subtle bittersweetness for tired hearts. If you loved Mac DeMarco’s Salad Days, you’ll love dead astronauts.
Written by Ino Mara
