Cornelius

Keigo Oyamada, who has worked under the name Cornelius since the start of the ’90s, is one of modern music’s great architects of surprise, an imaginative artist who has never run out of ways to make pop music feel new. Oyamada first began working as Cornelius after his promising Flipper’s Guitar duo split, but his worldwide breakthrough arrived several years later with Fantasma, an electrifying and dizzying 50-minute romp through a field of psychedelic samples, where sizzling punk riffs raced through breakbeats and behind honeyed harmonies, where the act of counting became the basis for a rock blastoff, where Beach Boys reverence first bled across blissed-out drone and then Floyd-style anthems. Fantasma not only remains a central document of Japan’s playful Shibuya-kei movement but also a testament to the porousness of genre borders. The Internet would soon shatter such lines even more; in the late ’90s, though, Fantasma presaged Panda Bear and Prefuse 73, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots and The Books.

True to Fantasma form, Cornelius remained restless. Point, from 2001, plunged into abysmal noise and sauntered through whimsical Tropicália, but it mostly treated pop songs as an invitation to be elliptical, to reconsider structure and narrative. Where 2006’s Sensuous used country, jangle pop, and math-rock as starting points, 2023’s Dream in Dream was a drift through languid electronics and twilit harmonies, several of Cornelius’ songs suspended in glorious haze. But Oyamada sprints out of that instantly on 2026’s Refractions, another stylistic shift that doubles as arguably his brightest album since Fantasma. With guests like Sean Ono Lennon and The Monochrome Set’s Bid sharing vocals, he swivels among neon pop-punk, sizzling electrofunk, and florid city pop. Cornelius’ albums have always been immaculate works of sound design, and his live visuals follow suit, worlds of surprise built to fit his songs.