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Aili drop powerful new release Damewadame / Shindara

Posted on 30 May 2025
Industrial-edged techno with a vital message about consent in club culture

Having delivered one of 2024's best debut albums, Nandakke?, Belgium-Japanese duo Aili have spent much of the past 12 months bringing their kaleidoscopic collision of electro-pop, electronica, house music and more to clubs and festivals throughout Europe, Mexico and Japan. Not wanting to leave us hanging though Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters are back with two new club ready tracks, Damewadame and Shindara, the vibe of which will be very familiar to anyone who's caught the band's live show and experienced the moment their neon hued electronic pop gives way to a calorie burning blast of beats, bass and strobe lights.  

Whilst these new tracks have already made themselves very much at home in Aili's lives sets, their origins lie in the soundtrack to an upcoming Belgium TV series, Drift, that the band were invited to score. The series follows a group of 20-something Brussels friends, navigating the shifting sands of sex and love in the 21st century, and Aili's music provides a perfect backdrop as they explore the increasingly relevant issues such non-monogamous relationships, trust and consent that young people are dealing with today.  

The first track here, Damewadame, was originally created for one of Drift's party scenes. When it came to turning the original 30 second or so snippet into a complete song Aili wanted it to reflect not just some of the themes of the show but the band's own concerns with what's happening in clubs in Belgium, and indeed around the world, today. The result is one of Aili's harder tracks, that veers more towards industrial edged techno and where rattling percussion and overdriven bass underscore the urgency of Maruyama's vocals.  

“Here I’m literally singing 'Yes is yes. No is no,' as the song is about consent in clubs," she explains, a hot button topic in Belgium in the wake of several high-profile incidents of spiking and sexual assaults. "It's an important subject, especially in clubbing environments where people take drugs, or they're intoxicated, and it can become a blur and people use that as an excuse. There's been a few cases in the news recently and it's good it's finally being taken seriously as all my female friends have a bad story, and some of my male friends too. So this is just a simple but clear message, a yes is a yes, a no is a no. Even if you're intoxicated you know what that means.”  

With many of the scenes set in Brussels' vibrant clubland Aili needed to provide an appropriately up-tempo accompaniment and for inspiration looked back to a track written for their very first live show when they needed something explosive to end the gig with. Never properly recorded until now, that intense end of set workout has been vastly overhauled. Now retitled Shindara, the track eases us in with a soaring, almost meditative intro, that sees Maruyama's vocals, glitch, echo and misfire over a bed of numinous ambient textures, before the drums and acidic synths kick in and drag us back to the dark of the dancefloor. Fitting for a song that, as Maruyama explains, ended up entering some fairly philosophical pastures.  

"The lyrics [in Japanese] are essentially about 'when I die, where do I go?' And I just don't know because I don't really have a religion to fall back on, but still it's something I often think about. So Shindara has this very long intro which is very light and uplifting, and you feel it's taking you somewhere peaceful but then it was fun to play with that idea, to have this big existential question and then turn it into a huge club track. It's a fun puzzle."