CHAI - GAME - Official Music Video

What this video is

Released September 2023 as a single from CHAI's self-titled fourth album on Sub Pop / Sony Music, 'GAME' represents CHAI's deliberate return to Japanese cultural heritage after the internationally collaborative WINK (2021). The song was written on the road and recorded at Stones Throw Studio in LA, with city pop — a Tokyo-born '70s–'80s fusion of jazz, funk, boogie, and yacht rock — as the album's primary aesthetic…

Why it matters

Represents the 2020s wave of Japanese indie acts recontextualizing city pop and new wave for international indie-label audiences, merging feminist J-pop identity politics with '80s Western genre pastiche. The Sub Pop signing situates CHAI within a lineage of internationally distributed indie…

The director

Cameron Lew is a Southern California-born director, editor, composer, and musician born November 26, 1995. He attended Chapman University and is also known professionally as the solo musical project Ginger Root. He has directed multiple Ginger Root music…