NOTION The Artists Vol. 1: The Japanese House

Amber Bain, best known as The Japanese House, has spent nearly a decade crafting a soundscape as introspective as it is expansive, blending melancholic lyrics with shimmering, layered synths. Since her breakout, Amber has established herself as one of indie pop’s most intriguing voices, known for her willingness to blur the boundaries between vulnerability and strength, past and present, introspection and connection.

Starting out anonymous with rumours flying around as to who the unidentified artist was – no she was not Matty Healy’s side project as Tumblr thought for a while back then – The Japanese House dropped ‘Still’ in 2015 to widespread interest around the mystery. Wanting to keep it all about what she made, and unsure if she was ready to share her name or gender, the rising star kept her identity private for a little while before realising that the anonymity itself might become bigger than what she was making. “I wasn’t really hiding when I was first writing,” Amber explains when we talk about her evolution over the last 10 years. “The lyrics then are slightly more abstract but looking back I think that’s mainly a stylistic thing. I thought it sounded more intelligent probably to speak metaphorically and more poetically,” she laughs.

Since, Amber has found freedom in the honesty and rawness of songwriting: “As I’ve got older, I’ve naturally become more inclined to write lyrics that are quite blatant. I try and find romance in the simple ways of saying things. I think the best songs and the best lyrics are ones you hear and you can’t believe they’ve not already been written. You’re writing and thinking like, ‘Wait, is that a classic lyric that I’ve stolen from something? Or is that just a new way of saying something?’ Because everything has already been said. Now I find that I’m naturally more drawn to just being quite open”, Amber continues, explaining that she tries not to fixate on it too deeply when writing, “I’m not thinking, ‘Oh, I need to tell the world this’, I am just randomly pulling things from a hat.”

With an eclectic selection of influences – from poetry to visual art – Amber is inspired by the ethereal and the personal, often blending the two as she transforms lived experiences into musical narratives. Brought up on an alliterative diet of Blondie, The Beatles and The Beach Boys, Amber explains that she was “obsessed with anything that had strong harmonies in it”. “It felt like as a kid, I spent half my childhood on journeys in the car and that’s where we’d listen to music,” she reminisces.

In fact, it was on a childhood journey that her moniker was born: influenced by a trip to Devon where she posed as a boy for a week after meeting a neighbourhood girl, a young Amber and her parents stayed in a cottage owned by Kate Winslet called the Japanese House. Somewhat of a queer awakening for the artist, Amber’s memories of her experiences there inspired the intentionally gender-less presentation of her musical work years later, as she settled on being anonymous and androgynous with the stage name The Japanese House.

Finding – or indeed losing – a muse has been paramount to creating for Amber, whether in the form of a literal person or a moment of perspicuity, there is something utterly kismet about the way she makes music. Her sophomore album, In The End It Always Does, was theraputic in many ways, closing the chapter on a relationship as well as on the project itself. “It was cathartic and it was painful, but when the pain is kind of nice; it just felt like things were moving again when they had felt so still for a long time.” Releasing the album last year in 2023, it took The Japanese House into a new place professionally and personally: “I loved making that album so much that I think it will probably define how I make all of my records. I love that it feels like one thing.”

“I actually don’t really like my first album [Good at Falling] that much to be honest”, Amber confides, “I feel like I was kind of cheating: I was so young that I felt like I had to finish something quickly before I got in trouble. I rushed to finish my coursework or some shit like that”, she says sarcastically. “But the second album I listen to and I’m just like, ‘This is great as one thing: it’s perfect how it is’. I loved the process of making it, I was so happy to be doing something. I didn’t feel like I was working, I felt like I was in my element. I should have been really sad, because I was going through a breakup, but I was completely alive.”

After such a transformative experience, Amber is approaching art in a new light. Dropping ‘:)’ this June, again, the muse struck: “It was one of those moments where it just all happened at once. I was kind of writing it as a joke… I was in a session with someone so was actually supposed to be writing a song for them. I hadn’t slept in about five days, because I was talking to my now girlfriend just constantly online and on the phone. I just wasn’t sleeping, I felt like I was on drugs, and I wrote all of that in about ten minutes. Wrote the song, sent it to her, and that was that.”

t seems that this is often the way for Amber Bain, the source or whatever you want to call it takes over and the creativity spills out. “You sort of have to channel it from somewhere”, she explains, struggling to do so during times of chaos or when feeling creatively saturated, sometimes it’s in this struggle that the clarity is found. “I feel most creative when I’m procrastinating and I almost am working against boredom. On tour, I’m rarely ever alone, I’m on a bus or in a room with people constantly. I barely even manage to listen to music when I’m on tour because I’m always with other people. But there are times when I push past these barriers and obstacles in order to make something when I feel it. That’s when I wrote the remix of ‘Apple’, on tour recently.”

Befriending Charli xcx via her fiancé George Daniel of The 1975, one of Amber’s close friends and collaborators, being a part of the phenomenon of Brat was not something she’d exactly expected. “Charli kind of just asked me”, she says simply when we talk about the beginnings of the collaboration, “George is one of my close friends so we’ve become friends too, and before it blew up I think she thought that ‘Apple’ had some of my vibes to it. She was explaining the concept of the [Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat] album and said ‘It’d be great if you could try and write something for it’.”

Unsure of what route to take with the track, Amber explains that she didn’t know what to do for ages, then one day when listening to the Lorde remix of ‘Girl, so confusing’, the muse struck again, “I just decided to do it one day, I sat down and thought ‘let’s just see what happens’. I got the stems and I loved the part where she sings ‘I wanna know where you go when you’re feeling alone’ so I started with that. I wrote some different chords underneath it and then it just happened. I sent it to Charli and she loved it. I probably did it in about 20 minutes.” A humble brag, I joke, to which Amber responds laughing, “I feel it’s almost less of a brag because it doesn’t really feel like I was doing it. ‘Let’s just see what this is’ and then it takes over, I had a vague skeleton structure of something, listened to it about 7000 times on repeat and then I make little changes until I like it”.

The remix itself, though, is definitely brag-worthy. Adding a new level to an already thought- provoking track, it enhances Charli xcx’s metaphor of what we take in and carry on from our ancestors, or put simply, of how parents can really fuck you up. Singing “You make me, so sad, so sad / And you make me / You’re making me so sad, so sad”, Amber’s lyrical semantic shifting of ‘make’ and ‘making’ to show how parents ‘made us’ is easily missable, but – as pointed out by her partner on Instagram – is incredibly thoughtful. “It’s a really personal song to listen to because everyone has a unique dynamic with their parents, even if you have the best relationships with them, they still have an impact. It’s such a strange thing, isn’t it, to bring a person into the world. Every single way in which you interact with them affects them for life. Then they leave you and go and try to live their life. Even if you haven’t made any mistakes as a parent, there’s going to be some way in which people struggle and you can’t really escape that. I think a lot of the time, especially if you have a difficult relationship, to acknowledge that the person who has hurt you also made you, it’s quite poignant.” Delving into the complexities of mother-daughter relationships and generational trauma, lyrically it’s straightforward and stripped back yet expresses so much.

In many ways, this summarises The Japanese House. She’s a person with simple pleasures – see above regarding her girlfriend, dogs and music – and writes lyrics which truly reflect such universal feelings. Her cult hit ‘Sunshine Baby’ exemplifies just that, she sings “I wanna be a part of it / I wanna sing along / The feeling when the windscreen wipers line up with the song”. It’s those quiet moments, of feeling unadulterated joy for the first time in a while, of feeling peace instead of unrest, of the sensation of true connection; that’s what Amber Bain really captures.

It’s why over her career so far, collaboration has been so important to The Japanese House. From featuring Justin Vernon early on, to developing a working relationship with Matty Healy, George Daniel and The 1975, to making music with MUNA and Katie Gavin – who Amber explains is “probably my favourite songwriter ever”, intimacy drives her work and inspires her. “I think Katie’s just got a really great way of saying things. With ‘Morning Pages’, I didn’t really know where to go with it, she started writing from her own experience and it perfectly fit into the context of the song; it was amazing and I didn’t even realise that it was gonna be kind of prophetic until we’d recorded it. She also really helped with ‘One for sorrow, two for Joni Jones’, the last track on the album. I wanted to do this sort of Joni Mitchell-esque melodic rambling over chords that I’d written but I was stuck. Katie was just like, ‘Oh, I’ll give it a go’ and her first take reduced us all to tears. We basically kept it exactly the same.”

Working with fellow queer artists and creatives like Katie and Chloe is also of utmost importance to Amber, “that’s an integral part of it”, she explains. “I’m singing about all these queer experiences, so it’s important that there’s at least someone else in the room who can fully understand when we’re deciding how the album’s going to sound. I’m so bored of working with old men. I know so many people have such difficult experiences with these old male producers, they’re patronising and think that they own your record, they want so badly to put their stamp on it that it gets in the way of doing anything. I would just go crazy if I ever had to do that.”

As she enters the next stage of her life and career, she’s taking it a day at a time. Music-wise, she’s working and creating, unsure of whether ‘:)’ is part of a new era or not: “I think I’m still to decide that. I’m writing an album at the moment which is all very love-based but I’m kind of just at the beginning of it. I’m gonna throw a bunch of stuff in the air and then we’ll see where it lands”, she says nonchalantly in true The Japanese House fashion. Whilst living life on her terms and finding the boundaries that work best, when it comes to making music Amber Bain is happy for the universe to take the wheel, and why wouldn’t she be, look at where it’s taken her so far.