あばらや - 夢回線 [2026] | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ (10/10) | Screenshot: れ！
Full album is currently physical-only. | Singles Playlist | Order on Pixiv BOOTH
if i try to write alt text for this it might actually do me in, soz
(This review was originally posted to RateYourMusic on June 20th, 2026, but was written to be cross-posted. There might be slight differences if I make an edit to one and forget to update the other.)
The first song I ever heard from Avaraya was かなしばりに遭ったら (officially z__, but more commonly If You are Paralyzed by Sleep). I was on a walk in the small hours of a brumous February morning in 2026, when the song's beginning seconds stopped me dead in my tracks. The harsh Canadian winds skated across my cheek as the unnerving matrimony of 歌愛ユキ [Kaai Yuki] and ナースロボ＿タイプT [NurseRobot_TypeT] delivered some of the most striking lyrics I've ever read in a haunting croon, accompanied by a remarkably Feryquitous-like piano and Jersey Club bassline. I remained there in the snow for a while after it ended, staring through a utility pole.
"Who is this guy?" I asked myself. Thankfully, I live in the era of the Information Superhighway, so I saw no reason to wonder.
Avaraya (あばらや) is a Vocaloid producer who started making music at the age of 16 while studying at a technical college (per his comment on Neighbor). After a slow first year, a couple chance collaborations and higher-production music videos seeded his ascent. When Sleep released in 2024, it became his first track to reach 1 million views.
I played it two more times on the way home, then sat at my desk and watched the music video, only to be similarly gobsmacked. It leans heavily into those "liminal spaces" which are so popular with the youth these days. (Which I understand; I've visited my local shopping mall this decade, and it stirred up a unique type of dread.) Trends aside, it's a very impressive video, using procedural techniques to turn a simple room with a fixed camera into a frenetic, disorienting display. It looks like an art school final project, and I mean that with great affection.
But Sleep wasn't even his most popular or celebrated track, as it turned out. What brought Avaraya into the spotlight was its follow-up, 花弁、それにまつわる音声 (officially, The Sound About Petals).
Petals pushes that same surrealist angle to paint a picture of an artist in the 2020s: possessed by the creative spirit, yet isolated by the dog-eat-dog structure of social media. It took aim at a mode of culture critique that places the blame for "brainrot" on the young people immersed in it. It's elevated outsider art; enmeshed in the cultural sludge of the late Internet, in love with art in all its forms, and fearless in the face of encapsulation.
It was released on February 25th, 2025, on Avaraya's 18th birthday, for the Winter Vocaloid Collection. It took first place in the TOP100 category. It was nominated at MUSIC AWARDS JAPAN 2026. And it's not hard to see why; Petals is a step change in both the visual and musical domains.
By the time I'd fully processed it, I was convinced I was listening to a genius. So began one of the most intense hyperfixations I have ever had about a musician.
In April 2026, when Avaraya teased his first (double length!) album, 夢回線 (Yume Kaisen, roughly "Dream Line" or "Dream Connection"), I immediately posted the teaser in all my active Discord servers.
"I'm convinced this could be AOTY material," I proclaimed. "Avaraya is a maniac."
This review has taken me three tries so far. Communicating what about 夢回線 just does it for me, without sounding like a raving lunatic, or worse, like I'm being hyperbolic, has been very challenging.
But if it gives me any credence at all, know this: To get this album into Canada, I had to pay about 2x the sticker price in fees. I don't regret a dime.
As of this writing, 夢回線 is physical-only. It's unfortunate, but I do understand why. It isn't just offering the music, but an experience with a physical object. The album comes in very spartan packaging; a DVD-height Digipak, pitch-black. The only decoration is the front cover and Avaraya's logo on the back (all duplicated on the spine, along with a catalog number that feels like it's only here because it needs to be.) No track list, no credits, no writing besides the title, emblazoned in an eerie Kanji ambigram. Even the panel under the booklet is completely bare. The CDs are 1/3 unlabelled. It's austere. It creates this sense of foreboding, like standing on the porch of an ancient mansion under a sky blackened by stormclouds.
I opened the metaphorical doors and made myself at home in the inky darkness. After a quick rip of the discs because my only optical drive is on my laptop and its audio is... pretty dire, I settled in, hit play, and opened the booklet.
I can't show you the booklet, as it's more than informational and thus protected by copyright. And even if I could, I wouldn't dare spoil it. But the way these lyrics are presented is artistry in itself, setting every song on its own vivid stage. The range covers medical paperwork to advertising to the MS Paint scrawlings of a madman you'd find in a far-flung corner of GeoCities, and everything in between.
My Japanese is bad, guys. But as I sat at my desk, booklet in hand, I tried my best to follow along. Many times I failed, even on a couple songs whose translations I've burned into my memory already. But taking in the illustrations and typography, it didn't seem to matter. I just got the point anyway. (I later worked through interpreting some of the exclusives more thoroughly, though I'm not good enough to make a translation worth publishing.)
夢回線's aesthetic defies summary. But if I had to pick a word, it'd probably be "syncretic." There is no corner of contemporary music that Avaraya views as untouchable, or incapable of synthesis.
The album starts in a hazy, heavy, vaguely shoegaze-y post-rock realm with elements of artcore, and ends in a vibe which I can describe like "Vocaloid-era Eve gets really into PC Music." The journey takes us through cuts of proto-hyperpop, secret-level-core acid jazz, jangle pop with a head cold, and a heterodox, funk-forward take on yakousei. The negative space is filled out with infectious dance grooves and copious amounts of bass guitar, keeping the whole machine chugging along, even when the moment calls for a bit less complexity.
There's not a single dull moment in the hour-long runtime; Avaraya pushes every concept he summons until it snaps. On a regular basis, I questioned the sanity of both Avaraya and myself, at the same time.
All this, and I don't even get fatigued by it. After my first listen, I ran it back twice before I went to bed. Kakuly, Avaraya's mastering engineer, has got to be some kind of space wizard.1
Avaraya's own voice is a key part of this record. Producers harmonizing with a vocal synth isn't unheard of, and Avaraya does this a lot across the album. But he goes as far as being part of two duets, and taking the title track all for himself. And on that title track, he holds nothing back, pushing himself as hard as every other part of the record. It's brave, and infuses the track with a groundedness that provides some reprieve from the utter mania of the latter disc, pitching it downward for a landing.
And that's to say nothing of his synthetic companions; the tuning on this album is just a masterclass. Here, too, Avaraya refuses to pick a lane and stay there; the voices of every song are tailored to the aesthetic at issue. Within the same 20 minutes is one of the most realistic performances I've ever heard from a vocal synth, and then Defoko, the default UTAU voicebank, squealing a high note, the way that made people's skin crawl when I was in high school, at the emotional apex of the entire album.
The experience of my first listen was... strangely intimate. When I was done, I felt an inexplicable sense of trust, like a close friend had just told me something deeply personal. In the vast blackness of the album's package, to which it returned after an hour of shining in colors I'd never seen before, I felt like a stranger had invited me into a corner of their heart. Inside this imposing, unorthodox shell was a vibrant inner world, and it was weird and wonderful and built of thousands of fragments of everything it's ever loved.
夢回線 is many things. It's maximalist yet intimate, a capital-S-Surrealist expression of the pervasive neuroses of Generation Z. It's self-deprecating in that iconic Zoomer mode, yet laden with genuine grief. It's a plea for humanity to remember that we need each other. It's therapy through memes, trading in irony and sincerity in a bizarre chiaroscuro. It's the product of a soul not simply "outside" of society, but diffused throughout it, flowing freely through the world of contemporary art across time and space. It's an album that spends its hour creating snapshots of emotion so fine-grained that they march backwards across the blood-brain barrier and take up residence in my bones.
It's just an excellent use of free will.
To tell the truth, I find it hard to talk about this album intellectually, in my usual analytical voice. I just melt into the shape of it on contact, unable to tell where the album ends and my projection onto it begins. I've struggled to verbalize the immense power it's had on my psyche in the last few weeks. I've probably been really annoying about it to my friends, frankly, and I'd like to thank them for bearing with me while my brain gets rewired.
I don't know where Avaraya gets a lot of this stuff from. Many of the scenes that influenced 夢回線 are blind spots of mine. But the paths towards his muse do make sense to me, considering that he grew up mostly in the 2010s. It was an era of creative pluralism, where it didn't really matter what you were making, as long as it was novel. It was the peak of Internet remix culture. So much art called back to other art. As long as you gave credit and weren't being exploitative (seeking profit or plagiarizing,) You Could Just Do Whatever. Everything everyone liked got passed around, and if what you made was Good, It Got Noticed.
You probably don't need me to tell you that this isn't the case anymore. The monoculture exploded during the pandemic, and now the Internet is yet another dying mall. I don't know anybody who has any clue about what's happening in media beyond their local minima. But those ghosts still roam the halls, not far away if you know where to look.
In this landscape, albums like this, which look to the past not for mere nostalgia, but as a roadmap to breaking down barriers, are very well-positioned to break new musical ground.
Avaraya will inevitably feel some pressure in following this record up. But if he stays on this path, letting his heart guide him in spite of the pernicious isolation of our era, he has a future as one of the most visionary new producers of our decade.
As of this writing, I'm 28 years old. I've been listening to Vocaloid music for just shy of half my life. I describe myself as having been "changed" by じん's Kagerou Project, wowaka's Unhappy Refrain, 鬱P's 悪巫山戯 [Warufuzake], ゆよゆっぺ's Draw.
夢回線 stands up there with every single one. It might even compare favorably to many, in some respects. (I'm currently reconsidering every 5 I've ever given.) If there's any saving us, 夢回線 will be remembered as the representative of this generation of Vocaloid music, as Unhappy Refrain represented the last.
This is my hole. It was made for me. Avaraya engineered this album to drag the soft squishy thing piloting the mech suit of my body into the open and fucking obliterate it. I think if you're a similar type of autistic, socially deprived, emotionally constipated allophile to myself, this album might have the stopping power of a nuclear bombardment.
This album makes me feel stupid. It makes me feel powerless. It makes me feel vulnerable. It makes me feel human.
It makes me feel connected.
What a privilege.