Sheena Ringo

Sheena Ringo emerged in Japan in the late 1990s, quickly establishing herself as one of J-pop's most distinctive and uncompromising voices, pulling together rock, jazz, enka and classical arrangement into a sound built around her own theatrical, technically demanding vocal performances. She wrote and produced her own material from the start, unusual for a young woman working within a major-label pop system at the time.

Shōso Strip, her second album, arrived in 2000 and pushed her sound further into orchestral, big-band-inflected territory than her debut had. She went on to found the collective Tokyo Jihen later in the decade, splitting her subsequent output between that project and a long-running solo career, and has remained a major and often boundary-pushing presence in Japanese popular music for over two decades since. Her catalog outside Japan remains under-documented in English relative to her actual stature at home.