• Envy "Seimei" 10"

Pelagic Records


Black Vinyl

For over 28 years ENVY from Japan have been crafting soaring compositions with captivating melodies that owe as much to Explosions in the Sky and Mogwai as they do to Bad Brains and Cro-Mags. Their new EP Seimei continues to display a masterful control of tension and release in chords and melodies behind the steady spoken-word Japanese of singer Tetsuya Fukagawa. Seimei marries tear-inducing melodies with gut-wrenching grooves to create a real soul journey.

Throughout their storied career, Japanese ENVY have paved the way for iconic bands like Isis, Converge and Deafheaven with their unique sound blending elements of hardcore / punk with reverb-drenched tremolo-picked guitar lines owing to the world of post-rock. Envy sit right in between these 2 worlds, and prove that they are not as disparate as it seems at a first glance.

Envy have played iconic festivals like All Tomorrow's Party and Fuji Rock Festival over the years, have toured or shared the stage with bands like MOGWAI, EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY, ISIS, CONVERGE or DEAFHEAVEN and released split albums with bands like THURSDAY, JESU or THIS MACHINE KILLS. Envy have forged an idiosyncratic sound of driven intensity, where brutality and beauty seemlessly coexist and compliment rather than contradict one another. A sound that is built equally on the pillars of hardcore on one hand and post-rock on the other, so the term posthardcore makes sense to some degree... but it wasn't until years later that the term first popped up. 20 years after their inception, the band entered a stagnation period, when some original members left the band at the end of 2015. But once vocalist Tetsuya Fukagawa came back 2 years later, the band was revived and invigorated with 3 new members, inaugurating the „Envy 2.0“ era. 2020's „The Fallen Crimson“ was the first album born of this new era, and the first one released through Pelagic Records. It showed Env y at their very best: intense, overwhelming, beautiful and destructive, all at the same time, and wrapped into an incredibly raw and powerful sound of sheer immediacy.

A new wind is blowing within us“, says Tetsu, „the band is in good condition. We really wanted to get the initial impulse out of the 6 of us. We didn't care about what genre of music we were writing or if it was going to sell well, we just did what we felt was right“. The lucky crowd at HELLFEST 2019 and 2022 could witness this: Envy annihilated the crowd and every other band who played that festival, and left nothing but smoke and debris in their wake. With the release of „Seimei“, Envy once more honor their past, embrace the present and celebrate the future!