Hikaru Utada's WAP floods an entire room in the music video for "Bad Mode"

Today is Hikaru Utada's birthday. Their 8th studio album is available on streaming. And we've got the full music video to the album title track “Bad Mode”.

Being in the UK, I got to hear the song in full at the stroke of midnight, when the album hit streaming platforms before the release of the music video. And aside from the initial reaction of ‘Wow, this song is really fucking good’ (as I figured it would be based on the preview), I did wonder how the video would switch up in accordance to the song. But it didn’t disappoint.

Many of us who are into J-pop will know that often-times these days when we get short previews of music videos, the full thing (neither the song or video) gives anything more than the preview. It's just more of the same. So that's what I was expecting here. I did not think for a second that the whole song would switch up half-way through and that a bitch would be wading through water in the video and bussin' down in the middle of a Chinese take-out shop in a tulle skirt singing ♪ Hope I don't fuck it up again ♪.

Who woulda thought that Hikaru Utada would pull up in 2022 with a WAP that floods a whole entire room and a song about getting high with the word ‘fuck’ in it?

Nope. Me neither.

A Bad Mode review will be coming at some point between now and when the COVID asteroid hits to take us all out once and for all. But until then, I have put together a track by track mood board of each song on the album.

🔊 Stream Bad Mode: 🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Music | 🔴 YouTube Music | ⚫ Tidal