In the End It Always Does

In the End It Always Does is the second studio album by English indie pop musician Amber Bain, under the name the Japanese House. It was released on 30 June 2023 through Dirty Hit. The 12 tracks run 45 minutes. The album was received positively.

Background
The record was written in late 2021 and sees the musician "returning to her muse". Inspiration came from her "current relationship to her identity" and "growing up queer", mainly tackled by the lead single "Boyhood". The album came together as a result of all the relationships she has begun and lost over the years. Furthermore, it explores her experience of moving to Margate for a relationship that eventually came to an end. Diving more into the pop genre, the artist explores a multitude of topics, such as "beginnings and endings", "obsession and mundanity" and "falling in love and falling apart". Bain created the album with the help of Matty Healy and George Daniel from the 1975, Katie Gavin of Muna and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, amongst others. Production and engineering was handled by Chloe Kraemer, an experience she describes as "life-changing".

Bain announced the album in April 2023. Upon announcing the record, she released the second single "Sad to Breathe", a song she wrote "a long time ago" and which is in fact "one of the oldest" on the album. The song talks about disbelief following the departure of a person.

Critical reception
In the End It Always Does received a score of 82 out of 100 on review aggregator Metacritic based on ten critics' reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Adele Julia of Gigwise described the album as "a candid portrait of navigating the romantic world" and felt that "one of the record's greatest strengths is its unabashed discussions surrounding queerness and sexuality". Julia concluded that it is "so rare to find pop music [...] that holds honesty at its core despite the potential for rejection, creating an album that feels immediately resonant". The Skinny's Katie Cutforth remarked that the album has "a summery ambience, songs about emotional distance, and [Bain's] unmistakable voice", with her approach seeming as if "it's been flipped, with vocal hooks taking a backseat to highly textured folktronica instrumentation and a more impressionistic rendering of desire". Eric Mason of Slant Magazine called the album "heartfelt and fun in equal measure, flitting between moods and styles", although "with all this exploration, the record lacks a little impact, not quite achieving the cohesion and emotional gravity of Good at Falling". Brady Brickner-Wood of Pitchfork felt that the album "strikes a beautiful equilibrium, wedding perceptive writing with bright, buoyant production", writing that Bain is "at her best when she's embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt".

Track listing
Notes


 * "Indexical Reminder of a Morning Well Spent", "Baby Goes Again", "You Always Get What You Want", and "One for Sorrow, Two for Joni Jones" are all stylized in sentence case