Song of the Day: “Who’d You Kill” by Kishi Bashi

Apr 02, 2026

A decade ago, Kaoru Ishibashi—the violin-looping wizard better known as Kishi Bashi—found himself in a bit of a creative pickle. After the neon-soaked, orchestral maximalism of 151a and Lighght, he was running on “musical fumes” and facing a crumbling marriage. The result of that exhaustion was Sonderlust, an album that swapped sprawling symphonics for vintage synths and raw, analog vulnerability. Now, the 10th Anniversary Edition has arrived, polished up and packaged with a treasure trove of “Demo-arigato” versions that let us peek under the hood of his 2016 mid-life (and mid-career) crisis.

Sonderlust is the pivot point where Kishi Bashi stopped trying to be a one-man Pixar soundtrack and started being a human being. It remains the most fascinating branch of his evolution: the moment he traded his “orchestral ringmaster” hat for a Juno-106 synth and some very honest lyrics about wanting to run away. It paved the way for the more grounded, sociopolitical storytelling of Omoiyari and the genre-hopping Kantos. Without this record, he might still be trapped in a loop of “Bright Whites” clones, doomed to pluck his violin until his fingers fell off.

Ten years later, Sonderlust doesn’t feel like a relic of 2016’s indie-pop scene; it feels like a survivor’s manual for creative burnout. It’s an album that proves you can be heartbroken and still want to dance—or at least sway rhythmically while staring at a Moog.

While the album is famous for the dancy “Can’t Let Go, Juno” and the infectious “Honeybody,” My pick is “Who’d You Kill.” In a record obsessed with the “sonder” of others’ lives (the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own), this song creates a ton of atmospheric tension. It’s a “creeper” in the best sense—beginning with a skeletal rhythm before blooming into a cinematic pop landscape that feels like a space-age noir film. It captures the album’s central conflict: the desire for connection clashing with the fear of being seen. If the rest of the album is a party in a neon-lit basement, “Who’d You Kill” is the quiet, slightly ominous conversation happening in the alleyway outside.

The newly released “Who’d You Kill (Demo-arigato Version)” is also a particularly good example of how a song goes from an idea to fully fleshed-out. Stripped of the lush production, this version is lean and scrappy. It clocks in significantly shorter than the album version, highlighting the song’s fundamental architecture before the “space alien b-movie” synths were layered on top, and is almost more compelling for it. Hearing the “Demo-arigato” tracks back-to-back with the originals makes you appreciate the final product; you can practically hear Ishibashi figuring out how to balance his virtuosic tendencies with the “less is more” ethos that defines this era.