You might have heard city pop recently on TikTok or on The Weeknd’s track Out of Time – this is why the soundtrack to Japan’s boom years of the 1980s is having a viral moment.

Tel Liyanto wasn't alive during Japan's 1980s boom, but she loves the "timeless" City Pop hits of the era, now going viral thanks to a new generation of young, international fans.

In the 1980s, Japan found its regional answer to synth pop and disco in the form of city pop. This once mostly unknown genre is currently attracting a global interest thanks to reissuse labels like ...

City pop has always been a particularly weird viral phenomenon. As Cat Zhang previously wrote for Pitchfork, the genre originally pulled from American styles like funk and yacht rock and aimed for a ...

Styles is not the only one, or the first, to resurrect Japanese city pop. While this genre may have lost some of its lustre in the early 90s, it has come back with a vengeance 20 years later on ...

Japanese music from the 1970s and '80s seems to be having a moment in the West right now. Take the latest album from The Weeknd, which samples the 1983 Tomoko Aran track, "Midnight Pretenders." ...