Erotic Japanese Cuisine
Welcome back to Worldwide Wednesdays! It’s hard to believe that I wrote about three of my favorite new albums this week and I managed to miss the existence of Ça m’aurait fait chier d’exploser (“It would’ve really pissed me off to explode”) by the inimitable Sexy Sushi, released June 5, 2026. It’s a compilation album, but the tracks are generally hard to find on American streaming services. The band didn’t even form until 2004, and didn’t release their debut studio album until 2009, but their sound, then and now, is exclusively electroclash.
My dedicated readers will know some of my dedication to electroclash, possibly (probably) my favorite musical subgenre of all time. Rebeka Warrior and Mitch Silver started the band as electroclash was already beginning to decline in popularity, and by 2009, the genre was already totally out of the public eye. It’s too bad, because their 2009 song “À bien regarder ; Rachida” is one of the absolute best of the genre. And they didn’t slow down from there.
Electroclash is distinguished by its heavy use of 80s retro synths, simultaneous high treble and high bass, and typically filthy, or nonsensical, lyrics chock full of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll references. Perhaps the archetype of the genre is Miss Kittin and the Hacker’s “Frank Sinatra” (1998, released on an album in 2001). The 2003 film Party Monster, starring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green, Chloë Sevigny, and Natasha Lyonne, heavily incorporated electroclash, both in its soundtrack and in its themes. The music is both vapid and squarely designed for the dancefloor, or, alternatively, the cocaine-fueled conversation pit. Cocaine certainly featured heavily in the electroclash scene. It’s strongly artificial-sounding music, but that’s one of the reasons I love it so much.
Important electroclash musicians include Felix da Housecat, Miss Kittin, Fischerspooner, Vitalic, Tomcraft, DJ Hell, and Peaches. Several other artists recorded albums or songs that are notable in the electroclash scene, too: Ladytron, Goldfrapp, Le Tigre, Soulwax, Adult., and Scissor Sisters. But no band has been quite as committed to the scene and the sound as Sexy Sushi.
Curiously, I didn’t even discover Sexy Sushi until well after when I listened to electroclash in earnest, during my college years (2006-2010). But I listen to them all the time now. They hadn’t released an album since 2013! Last year, they released an excellent single, “La Politesse,” out of nowhere, and then last week a whole album. Exciting times. Rebeka Warrior has a side project with fellow French DJ Vitalic called KOMPROMAT, which has also released some excellent music. Like all good electroclash, you can play this new Sexy Sushi compilation album from start to finish and dance through the whole thing, as I did twice today. The vocals are abrasive, by design, and the music is too, but it’s so fun. The mere fact that this album is entirely in French makes it sound simultaneously classy and trashy.
While electroclash has standout songs, it’s best experienced in album form. The same is true of Sexy Sushi’s Ça m’aurait fait chier d’exploser, which you couldn’t tell is a compilation album if you didn’t otherwise know. It sounds as cohesive as any other album. The standout songs on this album are “Et alors,” “Estafette,” “Sex Appeal,” and “Cheval.” But they’re all good. Even the three-second-long “Michel Leeb.”
Sexy Sushi’s commitment to keeping electroclash alive inspired me this morning to try to revive it. I don’t know how, or even where. But the desire is there. For those of us who dig it, we really dig it. And now you get to be dragged into my past life as a coked-out, crazy-dancing, hard-partying iPod DJ. Would you come to an electroclash revival party? Would you travel to Paris or Berlin for it? I would.