Tokyo Tea Room on their new record and hearing old songs differently.
Tokyo Tea Room are somewhere between jet lag and revelation when we speak. Dan and Beth are in Seattle, colder than they expected, a long way from Margate and only a couple of shows into another North American run.
– WORDS BY CJ • PHOTOS BY Tamibé Bourdanné
They are tired enough to admit it, laughing about stretching on tour and the indignities of trying to keep a body functional while crossing time zones, but there is also the sense that the band has arrived in America at precisely the point where something is changing for them. For years, Tokyo Tea Room existed at the kind of pace that allows a band to develop almost privately: records made at home, laptops struggling beneath recording software, songs finding listeners gradually and sometimes inexplicably long after they were released. Then the numbers started climbing. Streams grew. Rooms got bigger. A first North American tour put actual bodies in front of statistics that had previously existed mostly on screens. People knew the words. Songs they had played to five people suddenly carried enough accumulated history to make a sold-out crowd feel like part of the arrangement.
That new reality sits quietly behind the latest Tokyo Tea Room record. Not because the band suddenly began writing for an audience, Dan is clear that the songs still have to begin somewhere much more personal than that, but because once you know somebody is waiting, it becomes difficult to completely forget them.
“It was more daunting, for sure,” he says. “I was a little bit worried that it might polarize the audience.”
The concern makes sense. Tokyo Tea Room built much of its following around a softer, hazier version of itself, the dreamier edges of earlier records becoming part of how listeners understood the band. The new material nudges that language somewhere else.
There is more pop in it, more disco, more deliberate movement. The surfaces have been cleaned up. Songs that might once have drifted now occasionally seem to wonder why everyone is still sitting down.
“We weren’t interested in creating another No Rush record,” Dan says. “We wanted to bring some of those pop and disco inspirations into this record. You’ve got to take the risk, otherwise you’re in danger of making something stale artistically or creatively.”
Nothing about that shift feels like Tokyo Tea Room detonating its previous identity. The fingerprints remain; they have simply become easier to see. The melodies come forward. The arrangements carry more air. There is still softness everywhere, but it no longer automatically means distance.
For the first time, Dan brought another producer properly into the process. Kristofer Harris had initially been intended as somebody who might help with a few pieces at his studio. Instead, the relationship expanded almost immediately.
“Once we started, we just had so much fun,” Dan says. “We got on, and we ended up sharing the same vision. It just felt like the right thing to do to continue working on it together.”
Tokyo Tea Room’s new album
Feel Forever was released
on September 18, 2026
That shared vision involved something close to precision. Dan has always obsessed over details, but earlier Tokyo Tea Room records were made within the limits of the equipment available to him. He talks now about laptops that could barely run the software being used to record them, limitations that accidentally became part of the sound. There was an intrinsic muddiness to those recordings, a DIY quality that suited the music so well it became difficult to tell where aesthetic choice ended and technological necessity began.
This time, they approached things differently.
“It was definitely a conscious decision to be more clinical,” he says. “Looking back on it, there are things where I would definitely introduce more of that. I’d introduce the mud.”
The thing that could easily have disappeared beneath all that increased precision, Beth’s voice, instead becomes one of the record’s defining features. Dream pop has always had a complicated relationship with vocals. The temptation is to bury them inside the same fog as everything else, turning a singer into another texture. Tokyo Tea Room avoid that. Beth floats without disappearing. The melodies remain legible even when the arrangement around her becomes increasingly detailed.
The strange part is that the record was not constructed around those vocals in anything resembling ideal circumstances.
Beth became ill before the vocals were finished. Rather than risk straining her voice before touring, they delayed them. By the time she returned to the studio, almost everything else was already there.
“I ended up doing it as the last thing,” she says. “It was the final piece to slot in and I had to find the pocket for the vocals to sit in.”
What saved them was preparation. Every track had been demoed extensively, so even while the finished arrangements grew denser there remained a map of where Beth was supposed to land.
That placement becomes especially important because there is melancholy underneath much of the record, obsession, uncertainty, emotional loose ends, while the music carrying it is increasingly interested in pleasure.
“Trying to express those feelings and emotions in a way that is more upbeat and dancey was kind of a fun activity,” Dan says.
Part of that came from playing the No Rush songs live and wanting something that could move differently in a room. But the deeper reason was simply curiosity. Tokyo Tea Room had made groovier music before; it just had not really entered the records.
“We need to explore this more disco-y, upbeat side to our music,” Dan says.
You can hear that curiosity in the way songs are being built now. “Eyes Off You” began with Dan finding a sound on a DX7 that eventually informed far more than the track itself. He talks about timbre almost as if it were another songwriting language: how the same chord played on a guitar, piano, Wurlitzer or synthesizer can reveal something different inside it.
“Sometimes you can play a chord on a guitar and then do the same chord on a piano, or a Wurly, or a synth, and you hear more in it,” he says. “Those imperfections in the circuitry, or the harmonic distortion, kind of lead my imagination.”
This may be the most useful way to understand Tokyo Tea Room. Their records are not really defined by genre so much as accumulation… tiny decisions made until a song starts pointing somewhere. Years ago, Dan described the band as “fuzzy guitar tones with attention to detail.” The attention to detail has survived intact. The guitar part is now less reliable.
“Fuzzy synth tones,” Beth jokes.
Dan laughs. “This record is more leaning into the disco influence. It’s got a sunnier disposition.”
The sunshine is more literal than you might expect. Margate hangs over the record too, particularly the contrast between a coastal English winter and the brief transformation that happens when summer properly arrives. Dan has talked about wanting parts of the album to feel like driving with the windows down on a warm day, an uncomplicated image that becomes more evocative when you understand what the opposite season feels like on the Kent coast.
But the band are not precious about listeners receiving that geography correctly. Once a song leaves Margate, people build their own places around it. “The responses are more personal,” Beth says. “They relate to it in their own way because the lyrics are so open-ended.” What Tokyo Tea Room understand much more clearly now is the audience itself.
Before their first North American tour, growth could still be witnessed largely as analytics. A number climbs. A song gathers streams. Followers appear. It is possible to know intellectually that thousands of people are listening while having absolutely no sense of what those people look like.
Then you walk into a room and they start singing.
“We were quite overwhelmed,” Beth says. “It was all numbers on a screen, everything was rising, but we didn’t know that people would literally be singing the words back to us.”
“You see the numbers on the screen,” Dan adds, “and to see it translate is absolutely incredible.”
That has not made him write for those people. Songwriting still requires shutting much of the external world out. But an audience changes other things. It changes how a set list works. It changes what an old song means. It changes the relationship a musician develops with something they may have finished years before everybody else discovered it.
Tracks like “Forever Out of Time” and “Things Are Changing” have followed Tokyo Tea Room through almost the entire arc of the band. They have played them to practically empty rooms. Now they play them to sold-out ones.
“You have people who fall in love with an era that is a bygone era for us,” Beth says.
Dan sees the same contradiction. “We’ve played those tracks to an audience of five people, when we were playing to nobody, and now it’s sold-out rooms. There can be an element of, ‘Maybe we’re over this song a little bit,’ but when you play it to a room full of people who respond to it, it feels new.”
That may be the most interesting thing happening inside Tokyo Tea Room right now. The band spent close to a decade gradually figuring itself out before a much larger audience arrived. There was time to make imperfect records, to let limited technology become part of the aesthetic, to follow strange guitar tones and then stranger synth tones without every creative turn needing to function as a campaign strategy. Now the audience has caught up, but the instinct to keep moving has survived.
The challenge is not to preserve Tokyo Tea Room exactly as listeners first found them. It is to preserve enough of the thing people fell in love with that the band can keep changing without severing the thread. Dan still has not found the perfect sentence to explain what Tokyo Tea Room have become. He lands somewhere around “indie disco” with a sunnier disposition, then immediately seems unconvinced by the need to package it so neatly.
Maybe that is for the best.
Ten years into a band, knowing exactly how to describe yourself would probably be the less interesting outcome.
