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When CHAI performs live again, “END” could be their reintroduction. One of the best manifestations of their buzzing, sometimes-bananas energy on all of WINK, the Japanese band’s third and latest album, it’s confident and brimming with shameless defiance, driven by a clangy beat with a purpose for dancing. Belied by the bubbly exterior, though, are the unexpected emotional chords that the song tugged on for MANA, the band’s lead singer. “END,” she says, is actually directed at the bullies who used to throw sexist insults like “stupid” and “overbearing” at her and her twin sister KANA, who plays guitar in CHAI. MANA doesn’t tend to write lyrics for the band — she’s fond of saying she finds it easier to communicate through the music itself — but stuck home indefinitely during the pandemic gave her time to think about “so many things that I wanted to say that I just normally couldn’t.” Recording the song with the rest of the band, MANA imagined herself finally giving those boys their comeuppance her way: “Shut up! Cool your head!” she shouts. “I might have shed a tear or two,” she recalls of the catharsis, through her translator. “But I think I needed that to make that song.”

“END” doubles as one of the latest expressions of the neo-kawaii spirit that has guided CHAI from their beginning in the early ’10s. Kawaii is Japanese for “cute,” but the same language has been used to restrict and reduce to one aesthetic, often referring to women who are thin with unblemished skin and big eyes. CHAI push back on this by making cotton-candy sweet music to invite anyone to find space in neo-kawaii, detached from any one look. “You are so cute, nice face, come on, yeah!” MANA declares on the singalong-primed “N.E.O.,” the second track on CHAI’s 2017 debut album, PINK. But four years later, on WINK, CHAI had to figure out what neo-kawaii means to them now that self-love is more mainstream, and so is the band’s audience. Another wrinkle: They had to do some of that work while quarantined separately in Japan.

It’s now early May 2021, and MANA is on a morning video call in Tokyo with YUUKI, CHAI’s bassist who also writes most of the band’s lyrics. At this point, Japan is in the middle of another COVID-19 restraint order, where some nonessential businesses are closed and people are encouraged to stay inside. MANA says people in Japan have become more lenient about going out and seeing others (masked and distanced, of course) as the pandemic continued. That includes MANA, KANA, YUUKI, and YUNA, CHAI’s drummer, who previously spent a painful two months apart last spring. (All four members go by nicknames or their first names for privacy, and don’t disclose their ages.)

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