Alternatively Titled: “I Listened to Every Album by The Pillows so You Will Never Ever Have to Listen to OOPARTS or Smile in Your Life”

Pre-Script: This blog is not coming back. I just have not seen anyone anywhere do this yet and don’t have any better place to write this out. Also happy three year birthday to this blog. I believe the first post was September 22nd?

Edit #1: Hey babes, I’ve since come back almost two years later (dated March 10th, 2020) to make a few adjustments to the list as well as add in their 22nd album Rebroadcast, which I originally wrote this list in anticipation for.

So what’s happened while I was gone? WACK is (actually) shit, OYSM are going on a US tour with Necronomidol, anti-idol became a marketable fashion trend rather than an anti-corporate ideology, Perfume have a new most-hated album, Seiko Oomori finally flopped but ZOC looks pretty sick, Haru Nemuri rules and I’m secretly the one who tipped Fantano off to her, The Pillows are still the greatest rock band to ever live, Galileo Galilei are technically back, my name is Stanley LOONA, Astroworld is album of the year, YESEO’s DAMN RULES is a close second, Vince Staples is the greatest rapper alive and said more with one song last year than Kendrick did with his whole album, Brockhampton didn’t really exist when I last posted here, Wednesday Campanella are doing what Nakata wishes he was…what else? NieR:Automata became the greatest video game of all time and Utada’s newest album isn’t quite as bad as we all thought it would be.

Anyways, with The Pillows 22nd album dropping this week and having just wrapped up their first US tour in almost half a decade, I’ve noticed nobody has ever ranked their albums properly like all those white people music websites always rank the same Beatles albums or whatever shit. S’not fair, man. It’s an underexaggeration to say that there are a lot of Pillows albums, because there are a lot of albums by The Pillows which makes them a terrifying band to get into for an outsider (especially one who hasn’t heard of them via FLCL like so many have), and not a lot of people have listened to every single one to definitively and properly rank them. I, however, have listened to every single album by The Pillows, and I’ve listened to them a lot. And there’s a few of them that are really…really not good. So let’s talk About A Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, shall we?

1. Happy Bivouac (1999)

When you talk to a Pillows fan about the best album, if they don’t talk about the FLCL soundtrack, this and Little Busters are the ones they likely will talk about. Compared to the unique twists of many of their other albums, this one isn’t anything super out of the blue. It’s just definitively, without a doubt, the unadulterated Pillows sound. Rock bands should have stopped trying after Last Dinosaur, it just doesn’t get better than that.

This one is honestly interchangeable with the next two and maybe even Runners High, but overall, when I think of The Pillows, I think about Last Dinosaur, and I think about Beautiful Morning With You, and I think about Crazy Sunshine. Listen to this on a beautiful sunny day and just feel good while you do it. That’s the kind of band these guys are. It’s a perfect ride, on a perfect day. The whole album is the standout track.

10/10, this is it, right here.



2. Good Dreams (2004)

I may sound a little crazy with this one, but hear me out - Good Dreams is actually the best Pillows album. It also happens to be without a doubt the most underrated one. Now listen, I might be just a tiny bit biased because this is the first one I listened to in full, but there is something magic about listening to New Years Eve while watching a sunset. I’m actually tearing up a little bit just thinking about it.

Compared to a lot of other Pillows albums, there’s also a good amount of English on this album; the intense power-pop opener (the ever-important opener, the most important part of hooking you into an album) Xavier is entirely in English; most of the hooks are on the rest of this album. It’s pretty accessible for people less inclined to music not in their native tongue.

Sono Mirai wa Ima is almost a spiritual successor of sorts to Last Dinosaur, musically similar and just as intense. The penultimate two-parter of Bad Dreams into the titular Good Dreams is really something special. Again, nothing out of the blue happening hear, just fantastic, quintessential Pillows.

10/10, most underappreciated Pillows album to date and my personal favorite.

3. Little Busters (1998)

This is the other one people will tell you about. For the third time as well, there is nothing special going on here. It is just definitively perfect rock ‘n’ roll music written and performed by The Pillows. You’ll likely not hear many Good Dreams songs live, but these are some of the most essential songs in their catalogue and you’d be crazy to not listen to this one in full before going to see them in concert. Another Morning, One Life, Hybrid Rainbow, and Little Busters itself are some of their biggest and best songs to date. Just perfect, simple music.

10/10

4. My Foot (2006)

Foot fetishists be warned, this ain’t it.

I’ve been on about My Foot for years and years, and since FLCL Progressive dropped, people are finally starting to appreciate how incredible this album is. This is one of the albums where they really shook their formula up a bit, focusing a lot on the guitar work, particularly in making each guitar track - usually hard panned left and right - dance around each other and work in tandem perfectly.

Sawao said that was the main focus and difficulty in writing and recording this one, getting the guitars just right. The opener, My Foot, is an emotional high point right off the bat, and is thankfully becoming an essential part to their catalogue. The guitar balance shows right away as everything kicks in from the drums and leads into a big jangly, emotional, and pop-centric chorus. It’s not quite as legendary as the string of albums The Pillows released at the tail end of the ‘90s, but My Foot still manages to be as incredible of an album almost 10 years after the gold standard The Pillows are held to.

10/10, this is it, chief.

5. Thank You, My Twilight (2002)

IS LIFE DELICIOUS? Probably. This album sure is. The last of their albums that are finally getting the recent attention they deserve, Thank You, My Twilight (let’s just call it Twilight from here on) does very little to change up the formula they found in the late ‘90s being their second album since Happy Bivouac, but that was a godsend, as the follow-up to Happy Bivouac, Smile, was only so-so and really lacked the hooky goodness that made The Pillows special. Taking a bit of everything, including a bit of the heaviness and the close-to-your-face vocal mixing from Runners High, Twilight really does a lot in its 41 minutes, but oh boy is it worth it by the end.



The song for which the album is named has always been one of my favorite songs by The Pillows ever, period. It’s emotional chord progression, use of a cute sine synthesizer for its main melody, and blend of English and Japanese in its lyrics, Thank You, My Twilight is a perfect love song with a gigantic guitar solo and explosive ending. That simple change of the first chord during the second to last repeat of the progression at the end is one of the most simple yet emotionally wrenching examples of songwriting in rock music.

9/10

Bonus Album: Another Morning, Another Pillows

While it isn’t technically a studio album, Another Morning, Another Pillows was a double-disc B-side collection released on the same day as Thank You, My Twilight and features some of my personal favorite and most underrated Pillows songs of all time. It even features artwork that serves as a compliment to Thank You, My Twilight’s artwork, with the camera panned over to the right, featuring the band dressed in drag at the next table over.

It’s not the most cohesive album, as is its nature as a B-sides compilation, but it’s an essential for any Pillows fan and still certainly more worth listening to than a lot of the albums towards the bottom of this list.

She Is Perfect has held up to this day as one of my top 5 favorite Pillows songs, and the chorus plays in my head basically any time I look at any woman. I’ll collect my simp bucks and head for the door.

idk, maybe like 5/10. She Is Perfect is a 10/10 song tho

6. Runners High (1999)

While this is one of the most Pillows-sounding Pillows albums there is, it’s also significantly heavier and darker than anything they did before or after it. The second in their three for three run of “essential” albums (Little Busters preceded it and Happy Bivouac succeeded it), Runners High also had music like the opener Sad Sad Kiddie, Bran-new Lovesong [sic], and Instant Music featured in the original FLCL soundtrack.

On top of those, White Ash sees them getting to some of their most aggressive playing even still to date, and Wake Up, Frenzy stands as one of their most underrated songs even from one of their more overrated (read: popular, still fantastic) albums.

10/10, depending on who you ask. Just don’t ask me, cause I think more around a strong 8 to a light 9/10.

7. Moondust (2014)

I guess Stroll And Roll wasn’t a huge surprise when Moondust managed to actually capture a lot of the vulnerable feelings that The Pillows’ late ‘90s albums had. I almost feel like I should put this one a little higher? Okay yeah, let me go back. This was originally #13. This one is actually a lot better than I remember it for. Let’s put this at #10. There we go, that’s much better.

Yeah, so what can we say about Moondust? I don’t know why this one is so underrated. Happy Birthday sounds like it could be a Little Busters B-side, it’s that good. It has a lot of those sweet, emotional, warm-heart-feelings that the trilogy of late ‘90s albums managed to convey so so so well. The only bad thing I could really mention here is Tokai no Alice, which just…doesn’t feel like it belongs. The chorus/hook is a chopped up sample of what it was recorded as and played back stuttered, as if Kanye was triggering the “LOOK AT YA!?!?”’s in Runaway live on his MPC. You know, the thing he did during the Yeezus tour where he made everyone flip with just that first piano note? You know the one.

Anyways, it’s a good song, but it doesn’t fit with the rest of the album, which really all flows like it was the fourth long-lost album that should have come out in 2000 but didn’t. About A Rock ‘n’ Roll Band, the titular Moondust, and Message are other huge standouts that just do what The Pillows hadn’t quite managed to do for a good few years leading up to this. Above all of that, though, Happy Birthday is not only the best song on this album, but one of the best Pillows songs to date.

8.9/10, oh man, should I have ranked this even higher? Maybe this one is better than Stroll And Roll… I have since edited this list and put this much much higher because it truly is one of The Pillows’ best albums to date.

8. Kool Spice (1994)

And here is where the falloff happens, just a bit - this is where people usually stop ranking the albums. And despite being an almost completely indistinguishable Pillows than the one that’s since become so cherished, this album manages to do something so unique and different than the entire rest of their discography and manages to do it damn well.

Very clearly inspired by Kanye West’s “Wyoming Sessions” for which all five albums released were only 7 songs long (I’m joking, obviously), The Pillows’ third album, Kool Spice, too, is only 7 songs long. But it works. This is not The Pillows you’ve just heard in the last seven albums I’ve talked about. This is a formative Pillows, who were running off of the then-colossal Shibuya-kei trend. It’s jazzy, it’s sparkly, it’s smooth, it’s clean. But most importantly, it’s really good, despite the band not really having their own identity yet. And being just a short half hour long, it’s a really easy listen compared to their other formative albums.

Be warned though - this at its core, is a jazz album, almost a bossa nova album, to best describe it for those who’ve never heard a Shibuya-kei song before (please do go listen to Shibuya-kei and help bring it back). Twilight Park Waltz is the real highlight here, for me. It’s so smooth and I can’t help but want to dance with someone and watch the sunset (a pretty recurring theme with these guys’ music).

9/10

9. Penalty Life (2003)

Another really underrated record in their catalogue that’s only now getting the attention it deserves, Penalty Life dropped just a few days under a year before Good Dreams dropped, and gives off a slightly biting edge to it compared to everything they had released up to this point, save for Runners High. This is still definitely The Pillows at its core, though. Freebee Honey, The Sun That Will Not Rise, and Mall Town Prisoner really stand out here, while the former two are becoming staples for them now, once again thanks to the second FLCL.

8.5/10

10. Stroll And Roll (2016)

Holy crap, dude, where did this one come from? Stroll And Roll is a slightly more straight-forward Pillows album, but this is them at their best only like two years ago as of writing this (September 2018). It’s not perfect, but this is The Pillows I grew up loving. Right off the bat, Debris hits you in the face; there is no count-in, it just explodes into the song and the booming doesn’t stop - even the chorus is a huge blast, one of their biggest hooks in years.

Following that up is the 6/8 (a lovely time signature to hear rock music in) One Flew Under The Cuckoo’s Nest, an emotional banger that surprisingly doesn’t mess up the pace immediately. If anything, it keeps us moving at a brisk one for the third song I RIOT to rush us along even faster. Don’t listen to that while driving though, you’ll get a bit paranoid. You’ll hear why, maybe you can already guess.

8.5/10, how the hell did this happen?

11. Pied Piper (2009)

Anyways, with the last three albums, we’ve been at a point where people usually stop ranking The Pillows albums. I’d say Pied Piper was a pretty big album when it came out, though. No Surrender offers a fantastic crowd singalong leading into its chorus that a lot of Pillows song don’t usually have. Nothing unique here, just really straight-forward and great Pillows music. Not as legendary as its predecessors, but there are some exceptional standouts like the aforementioned No Surrender, Across The Metropolis, and Ladybird Girl.

8/10

12. Wake Up! Wake Up! Wake Up! (2007)

Two years before Pied Piper, we got Wake Up! Wake Up! Wake Up! (I’ll just say it once from here on out). I like to think of Wake Up! as the lighter but still pretty heavy version of Runners High, but less pop-centric. Or maybe too pop-centric? It just doesn’t have the oomph you’ve come to expect from their other work, but it still manages to capture the exact feeling of what makes The Pillows such a beloved band.

The biggest standout, Scarecrow, still manages to be a cult-like fan-favorite and what I would consider a yet-still essential song in the overall Pillows discography. I actually overheared a few people shouting out for it at the NYC show I went to in July. I also am really partial to The Pleasure Song which has an ultra-infectious hook and upbeat but slightly nostalgic progression and fun hard-panned dual guitar parts that remind a lot of what they did with the guitars on My Foot. Yeah…think of this album like a smoother Runners High, though.

7.5/10

13. Rebroadcast (2018)

Rebroadcast was not yet out when I originally made this list, which I had actually written originally in anticipation of Rebroadcast’s September 2018 release. I’m pleased to confirm that Rebroadcast is, by all means, fantastic. The titular opening track feels absolutely triumphant and full of good energy, almost like a celebration, and it truly is - The Pillows are finally back to making consistently great records after a rough patch consisting of HORN AGAIN and OOPARTS

Rebroadcast doesn’t bring anything new or bold to the table, but it continues to deliver more of exactly what The Pillows are beloved for: really goddamn good rock music that just borders on alternative and punk songwriting. The biggest highlight here is the aforementioned namesake song Rebroadcast, as well as the second to last track BOON BOON ROCK.

7/10

14. Please Mr. Lostman (1997)

This is where The Pillows finally established their signature sound, on album #5. It’s not quite there on each and every song, but it is for most of them, and this is probably their earliest album with essential songs on it. This is where The Pillows finally made their genre transition with no hesitation. The opener, Stalker, is quite heavy, and features Sawao singing with a lot of distortion and some modulation effects on his voice. It sounds a bit like Runners High, actually, which we only had one album between here.

The second track, Trip Dancer, is The Pillows sound that we know and love, and this continues on with most of the album, save for Ice Pick and Girls Don’t Cry (clearly inspired by Frank Ocean’s hit album Boys Don’t Cry [it’s joke]), which are just a slight regressions to the sounds of their previous albums. Standouts are the albums’ namesake Please Mr. Lostman, Swanky Street, Stalker, Strange Chameleon, and Trip Dancer.

7/10, definitely my Pillows.

15. Nook In The Brain

The Pillows’ newest album, Nook In The Brain is actually pretty solid. With three more songs, it’s still the same length as Kool Spice, making it as easy of a listen. It does a lot of what Moondust and Stroll And Roll did, but a little more…I guess stiff is the word? Right off the bat we’ve got a fuzzy song called Envy. The hook isn’t huge, but it’s a solid song to start us off here and overall has some really nice chord choices that you just don’t hear in western rock music. It’s almost a little grunge-y.

Be Your King, the second track, sounds a lot like less well-produced classic Pillows. It has a hook that reminds me a lot of The Third Eye from My Foot. It’s good. Not great, but pretty good. They’ve been doing better. This album is incredibly fuzzy compare to a lot of their other records, and the hooks aren’t quite there but it’s really not bad. Nothing has been outright bad so far, but we might see some glimpses of it further down this list.

Hang A Vulture! is probably the biggest and best song on the album. It’s got a really strong, fuzzy bass and a huge hook that almost has a surf rock mode to it. Another great standout is Pulse. While it doesn’t have much in the way of a big hook going for it, the songwriting itself is phenomenal. It builds for almost the whole time into a chorus that doesn’t do too much, but the feeling of almost the whole song sounding like its the buildup to a drop is very very cool and something you don’t hear in a lot of songs. This record is actually a ways better than I remember it too, but we’ve still got a ways to go on this list, so no more time for regrets or changing the order. Other standouts that are just great songs are Jelanie and Coooming Sooon.

7/10, when it rains it pours, but when it shines it shines bright.

16. Trial (2012)

Trial was alright. It’s actually quite good; a lot better than it gets remembered for. Meaning almost not at all, despite being only a ripe six years old at the moment. It starts a little rough, the opener Revival isn’t fantastic, but it still establishes the album. The second track Rescue, however, is fantastic. It takes the dreamy major seventh chord work that Revival had worked a little more dissonantly with, and put it with the classic Pillows sound.

I’ve been saying that a lot; “classic Pillows sound”, I mean. It’s kind of a thing though. The Pillows truly have their own sound unique of any other band, despite having such incredibly heavy influences that shine very clearly in some songs more than others (you wouldn’t be wrong to think Little Busters’ One Life sounds a bit like Oasis, but Sally can wait for right now, because we’re talking about Trial here). This album actually sounds a bit like their older work in just a slight way. It takes a bit of the bouncier, more Shibuya-kei influence into its songwriting. It’s not super obvious, but you can really hear it in the Rescue chorus and songs like Flashback story.



Trial really doesn’t get the recognition it deserves as an album, because it’s still really good. Standouts are Rescue, Comic Sonic, Trial, and Ready Steady Go!.

6/10, this deserves more credit.

17. Living Field (1995)

Maybe this one should be higher, because it’s certainly an easier listen than Smile, which I originally rated higher than this, but upon relistening to this while writing it, I reordered them (and again, and again, and again, and almost two years later, I edited it once again). It’s actually pretty smooth right off the bat. It’s like Kool Spice but a bit harder, a bit more focused on what they would become. This is also where they slowly start to establish their signature sound. You know the one I’m talking about, baby. That “classic Pillows sound” I’ve been going on and on about. It’s not quite here yet, but it’s slowly being established before Please Mr. Lostman really shows it to us.

It’s pretty nice actually, it’s just a bit long, sitting at a plump 43 minutes. The opener Angel Fish starts off with a really groovy drum beat, a sparkly lead, and some very interesting chords that The Pillows wouldn’t again work much with. It would be interesting to hear them reintegrate these kinds of chords into their current trademark sound. We’ve got a lot of slow jams here, but The Killing Field picks up and shows us just a tiny bit that they’re ready to come out of their shell. Not quite in the way that I Want To Be Sullivan did, but it definitely shows that they wanted to be a bit harder. This album reminds me of something that I can’t quite put my finger on, but I almost want to say the original Sonic Adventure soundtrack. Maybe something in the chord movements or the modes and accidental notes in there. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Anyways:

5.5/10

18. White Incarnation (1992)

We’re in some obscure territory now - this one’s so old I can’t even find higher quality artwork than this. Their second album, White Incarnation does everything wrong that Kool Spice does right, but still manages to do better than their debut album where they really just had no clue what they wanted to be yet. They still don’t have a clue here. It’s pretty jazzy, inspired by the Shibuya-kei movement still, but doesn’t quite pull it off like Kool Spice does.

Surprisingly, I Want To Be Sullivan shows off the potential for the band that they would eventually become and is actually one of my favorite songs by the band. They rerecorded it for an anniversary album in 2009 and started playing it live again shortly, and it really fits in with their newer material. It’s actually quite aggressive, despite the soft mixing and recording quality. But despite this, this 48 minute album is just a bit too long for how variable the enjoyment of each song is. Not too many other standout songs here.

6/10, spoiler alert: they do what this album wanted to do but better on the album that would follow it.

19. Smile (2001)

I have moved Smile down and down all the way to the very bottom now (it was originally second to last but I’ve come back almost two years after writing) . We started at 17 with it. I remember it being okay. But man, this one just isn’t good. It’s not bad, but it’s not good.

I had originally put Smile all the way at the very bottom of this list, which was a bit harsh, and it has since made it’s way back up here to 19. I don’t quite know what had gotten into me writing this back in 2018, but coming back two years later to this list I think it’s unfair, because there are a few songs on here that are among my favorite and most essential Pillows songs, even if the back end of this album really starts to slog, and therein lies the problem.

There are hardly any noteworthy hooks here which kind of make or break a song, and it’s 12 song tracklist is really just a bit too long and bogs it down for how little substance each track actually has. I’ve never seen anyone say it, but maybe this one has some sentimental value for some people since it was the first album to come out since FLCL, and I’m sorry if you really like this one.

But it’s just…wew fellas, there is little to speak of here. At times, the album feels almost unfinished, with songs like Winning Come Back serving more like an interlude that they didn’t bother writing more of to be a full song, and Thunder Whales Picnic being another interlude (this time an almost 3 minute long instrumental that sounds like they mixed it down while the vocal track was muted and just said “eh” and left it as-is) that just feels out of place.

All The Way To The Edge Of This World is another solid cut with a pretty classic Pillows sound to it, but its chorus is pretty weak and the chords don’t work super well together during it, while the verse’s chords are so unbearably generic; the solo is cool tho. They wrote a better version of this song called One Flew Under The Cuckoos Nest off of 2016′s Stroll And Roll. You just read about it a little while ago. The namesake song Smile is pretty progressive sounding, but overall just slogs for six. fucking. minutes. in relative dissonance and minor chord downers.

However, that doesn’t mean it’s without it’s strong moments. I’ve retrospectively come to think about how much I like a few songs on this album. In particular, Good Morning Good News is one of my favorite Pillows songs and could fit into any of the three albums that preceded Smile with ease. Vain Dog is also just too weird of a song to not love.

Waiting At The Bus Stop is also great, it’s got a good flow, a cruising bassline, and a pretty solid hook, one of the few on the album.

3/10, and that’s being nice.

4/10, with such a strong opening string of songs, Smile quickly begins to become a bit of a snorefest.

20. Horn Again (2011)

Much like OOPARTS, Horn Again is “classic Pillows” sounding, but kind of lacks. Horn Again isn’t that bad. I think of all of their “trademark sound” albums though, it’s just not as meaty as them, and at that point where you listen to a lot of that sound, it makes the older albums a lot more interesting and changes up the pace, so they’re mostly above this. But this is by no means a bad album. Mmmmmm…mostly. It’ll definitely get your head bopping, but Horn Again certainly lacks big enough hooks to really, y’know, hook you in.

It also feels like a bit more of a decaf version of Nook In The Brain. A bit loose and fuzzy with a bit more riffing guitar work. It almost feels like Sawao was starting to get afraid of big hooks. Sad Fad Love, a fully English song, shows that he’s not entirely hesitant to write big hooks, it’s got exactly what you’d expect from a Pillows hook with a big long, shouted note to start the chorus, but doesn’t quite deliver by the end of it, or maybe in the production of it with not enough background vocals to cover the longer notes in the vocal melody. There is, however, not a single essential song to their discography on this album. Brilliant Crown and Nobody Knows What Blooms also reach about the same height, but with a little more emotional brevity and the latter having this kind of cute horn section that does the opposite of what horns usually do in rock music, which is quite cool. The former is definitely the best song here, but nothing essential, once again.

4/10 tho

21. Moon Gold (1991)

Yo, who the hell is this? This can’t be The Pillows, can it? At the very least, the following Pillows albums would at least have a defining sound that would eventually slowly morph into their signature sound, but Moon Gold almost feels like the sound that became that other sound. It’s a band trying to figure out what they are, and at this point, I think they were trying to figure out how to be a Shibuya-kei band.

4/10, this is the kind of debut for an amazing band with an amazing legacy that shows that it wasn’t always like that. I mean, not like Supercar anyway. Now that’s a debut album. I’d go as far as to say that Supercar’s Three Out Change!! is the best J-rock debut of all time.

22. OOPARTS (2009)

It’s not Oh-Parts or Oooo-parts. I believe it is OOP (as in OOPS when you mess up) and Arts. Oop Arts. Much like the Horn Again album that would follow, OOPARTS is definitely a Pillows album, but not quite to the level that albums that pioneered and solidified its sound are. The opener Dance With God even uses the same first half of the Crazy Sunshine hook, but just doesn’t do anything with it that Crazy Sunshine didn’t do better; it just feels like a cheap imitation of what they were once (and have since OOPARTS, once again become) great at. I think Lemon Drops is the biggest standout here. Not essential to their catalogue, quite a simple song, but definitely a pretty solid one that really pulls the album together nicely from both ends. It’s an otherwise overall forgettable album though.



At a mere 3/10, OOPARTS just has nothing that holds up to its older brothers.