There’s something about a grey Monday that asks for a song like this. Coffee in hand, nowhere to be, and suddenly Dejima’s “Camcorder” feels less like a track and more like company. It slipped in quietly for me—then those drums kicked off, and I was locked. The kind of locked where you don’t reach for your phone, you just sit with it.
I really love how everything sits so naturally. The drums don’t try to impress, they just are—steady, grounding, almost like a heartbeat you forgot to notice. Then the rest unfolds: soft-edged keys, that slightly hazy, bedroom-recorded warmth, and a groove that doesn’t push you forward so much as it holds you in place. And just when you think you’ve mapped the song out, there’s that flicker of psychedelia creeping in, like a memory glitching mid-playback. It caught me off guard—in the best way.
On the poetic side of it, “Camcorder” plays a clever, intimate game. Present self, past self—two voices circling each other, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not quite. You can feel the tension build toward that imagined “fight scene” in the bridge, and honestly, it lands. Not in a dramatic, overblown way, but like an internal argument you’ve had a hundred times and never fully resolved. There’s something deeply human in that. Haven’t we all had moments where who we were and who we’re becoming don’t exactly shake hands?
And then there’s the context around it—the album as a whole growing from a Boston college apartment to late-night sessions across time zones, even stretching into the Santa Cruz forest. That sense of movement, of transition, seeps into the track. It feels lived-in. Not polished to perfection, but shaped by time, distance, and figuring things out as they come. You can hear Dejima and Will Rockwell in that room, one on keys, the other juggling drums and vocals, chasing something they didn’t fully have yet—but knew was there.
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As an artist, Dejima leans into that in-between space most people try to rush past. There’s no pretending to have answers here. Just a willingness to document the shift—from who you thought you’d be to who’s actually showing up. And maybe that’s why “Camcorder” sticks. It doesn’t try to resolve the tension. It just lets it play out.
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