Best of What’s Next: Sen Morimoto

The music industry sucks. Touring feels like a rare luxury that still yields minimal living expenses. Avenues for independent music distribution are growing scarcer by the day. Predatory merch cuts mean artists don’t get the payout they deserve from venues. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are making it increasingly difficult for people without six-figure incomes to attend shows. There are fewer and fewer places to write about music, as billionaires buy publications without understanding what makes them special, and then lay off talented staff and use AI tools to write interchangeable SEO “content.”

It all feels like an inevitable byproduct of putative “late-stage” capitalism. Sen Morimoto, the Chicago-based indie artist, though, makes all this bleary malaise sound…fun? When Morimoto shouts “Fuck the cops, the banks, the legislature” on the fervently catchy “Diagnosis,” the title track for his third album, it belies the swirling, lively music that accompanies him. As Sonic Youth put it back in 1988, that combination of a playground for the 1% and a brutal wasteland for the remaining 99% is what makes America resemble a daydream nation.

Throughout the record’s 13 songs, Morimoto’s delightfully bizarre mix of acid jazz, funk and indie rock comes to life. Like if Fievel Is Glauque wrote longer songs, or the composer for Persona 5 made an indie album, Morimoto’s music is hooky, brazen and triumphant. In terms of how he has managed to fuse so many disparate styles into a cohesive whole, he attributes it to learning a genre on each instrument. “The way that I learned each instrument was in a different kind of band growing up,” Morimoto explains from his Chicago home via Zoom. “I learned drums playing in a punk band, and I learned saxophone while studying jazz. I learned guitar playing in an indie rock band. Those elements naturally come together because I don’t have another style in each of those instrumental languages.”

Thematically, most of Diagnosis concerns itself with the exploitation and systematic harm that comes from the music industry. It’s a subject that Sen Morimoto couldn’t help to avoid; as a DIY musician, he lives in it every day. When I ask him how he feels about putting this album out into the world, he’s perfectly candid. “Honestly, putting music out is really weird,” Morimoto admits. “A lot of artists, at least in my community and that I see online, are in this phase of figuring out where we land in the spectrum of capitalism or getting a sense of how things really work.” Capitalism both exploits artists for their work, yet it requires their participation in its system for them to make ends meet. As Morimoto sings on the chorus of the aforementioned title track, it’s a catch-22.

That contradictory notion surfaces in his life in more ways than one. To combat structural inequities and foster an artistic community, he’s the co-founder of Sooper Records, a platform that he uses to spotlight exciting artists like Nate Amos’ solo project This Is Lorelei and art-pop singer/songwriter Alicia Walter. “We’re still such a small label, luckily, that we get to experiment on everything,” Morimoto says. “We’re still learning so much all the time. The main thing I’ve taken away from this experience, and the perspective that I’m trying to hold on to as we grow, is that there’s not one right way to do it for every artist, and to really listen to what an artist wants out of that situation, which is not usually what you run into at a label.”

There’s also his podcast, the aptly named Industry Bullshit, which he co-hosts alongside his Sooper co-founders Glenn Curran and NNAMDÏ and audio engineer Steve Marek. The podcast’s origins stem from its creators feeling overworked and not being able to hang out as much as they want. So, they simply monetized spending time together. “There was a part of us that wanted to have some discussions about things like the music industry, things that we talk about in private all the time but that we hadn’t really seen presented on a public forum in that way,” he explains. “There was another part of us that just wanted an excuse to hang out. It’s another deeper layer of capitalism. It’s the only way we can see our friends, [when] it’s productive and related to work.”

The irony isn’t lost on Sen Morimoto. He’s acutely aware of it, as you can glean just from listening to Diagnosis. Whereas his first two albums, 2018’s Cannonball! and his 2020 self-titled LP, tended toward introspection and “psycho-analyzing yourself,” as he puts it, he steps outward on his latest endeavor, examining the macro implications of, well, industry bullshit. That much is reflected in the music itself, too. Previously, Morimoto played everything on his own, and the end result was noticeably lo-fi. For Diagnosis, he wanted to use a full band, the eight-piece outfit he brings on tour with him.

When it came time to transform his demos into the full-fledged, final versions you hear on the album, Morimoto had to get creative. He needed to translate his ideas to his band somehow. For drummer Ryan Person, who performs with Morimoto and his partner KAINA, Morimoto would play air drums alongside him, acting like a symphonic conductor to signal key shifts from one section into the next. And those fuckin’ drums, man. The off-kilter rhythms of “Pressure on the Pulse” and the in-the-pocket groove of opener “If the Answer Isn’t Love” are immediate highlights.

Person’s performance throughout the album is a prime example of how Morimoto’s music takes on a new light with a proper band. After all, the enemy of capitalism, a system built on callous individualism, is community. “In the face of so many disastrous developments, community is the goal,” he says. “You don’t have to have the answer. But, if you have the ability to build community, then you create the possibility of answers developing. That’s probably the key to unlearning this isolation that we all feel.” It’s okay to not have a ready solution when you point out that something straight-up sucks. Cops suck. Banks suck. Lawmakers suck. “But what do we replace them with?” your hypothetical relative questions at a family gathering. We may not have the answers yet, but, as Sen Morimoto demonstrates, maybe that’s something we can figure out together.

Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic in Kansas City. He writes the Best New Indie column at UPROXX. His work has also appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.