King Gnu was born out of the desire to whip together wildly different musical traditions—classical, jazz, classic rock, funk, hip-hop, and electronic—into a frothy, freewheeling representation of life in Japan’s bustling capital city. While frontman Daiki Tsuneta let loose a whirlwind of influences and ideas on his previous project Srv.Vinci, King Gnu allowed him to rein in his more avant-garde whims. Bringing in vocalist-keyboardist Satoru Iguchi, bassist Kazuki Arai, and drummer Yu Seki helped give Tsuneta’s manic experimentation more structure without losing any of its urgency. The result is a debut album rooted in heavy rock that twists and turns in more directions than the Tokyo Metro. With endless energy and very little predictability, Tokyo Rendez-Vous moves along like an intoxicating night in one of the world’s biggest metropolises. From the opening title track, the band takes off in a sprint, packing all its technical moves into a dizzying four minutes. Racing through squelchy electronics, buzzing bass, megaphone-boosted raps, and wah-wah guitar, “Tokyo Rendez-Vous” captures the messy joys and frustrations of youthful abandon within the disorienting sprawl of the band’s hometown. It’s System Of A Down and Rage Against the Machine set in an overcrowded train. However, the mood swiftly shifts gears on “McDonald Romance,” a jazz-infused downtempo shuffle dotted with piano and breakbeats that revels in fast love at the fast-food juggernaut. The pace picks up again on the bouncy alt-dance rager “Anataha Shinkirou” and the buoyant pop-punk bouncer “Vinyl,” both of which highlight Tsuneta and Iguchi’s contrasting vocals as they try to find common ground between idealism and reality. The second half of the album reveals even bigger ambitions, with the theatrical, multi-part power ballad “Haretsu” and its declaration that “everything is an illusion,” and the proggy “Low Love,” a sardonic statement on adulthood. By the strings-lined closer, “Summer Rain Diver,” the band finally offers some euphoric relief in its solo English lyric: “Dance, dance anyway, it’ll work, she says.”