Mei Semones

As the drums ease into a drift but just before they shift into a brief prog-metal sprint, Mei Semones offers a statement of artistic intent: “I am going to do this the way I wanna do it,” a smile seeming to extend through her voice. Indeed, no one else sounds exactly like Semones, a rigorously trained jazz guitarist who not only mixes bossa nova, samba, and orchestral pop with a little indie rock gusto but moves between Japanese and English in the same song, verse, and line. “It doesn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t speak both languages,” she told Stereogum in a hosanna-loaded profile for her 2025 debut album, Animaru, “but it makes sense to me.”

Semones grew up in Michigan and then headed to Berklee to study jazz performance. That’s when she met the standout band of violin, viola, upright bass, and drums that support her ever-surprising songs like a particularly flexible spine. “Norwegian Shag” suggests bossa nova reconfigured as acoustic math-rock, while “Toro Moya”—which opens with Semones harmonizing to a dazzling guitar line, only to be joined by an ensemble that treats her rhythm like an invitation to get ever trickier—peaks in orchestral grandeur before drifting into a soft-as-skin love song. Semones’ lyrics are full of animals and urban ephemera, but so much of that is in service of songs about love and life, about growing up with an unordinary way of seeing and sounding in the world and totally owning it.