Kirinji/V6 -- Suteki na Yoru（素敵な夜）

From YouTube

Always nice to have Kirinji（キリンジ）once more on the board as we approach the end of the year. And this one came out about a month ago as a track on their latest album "Town Beat".

"Suteki na Yoru" (What a Night) starts out with some really tight guitar and keyboards before things get into a fun and funky party jam...kinda reminiscent of Original Love. Written and composed by Takaki Horigome（堀込高樹）, I had assumed that the lyrics would be about a couple having the time of their lives painting the town red, but actually, it centres around some bizarre misunderstandings and misidentifications at a party. Time to lay off the absinthe of malice.

The crazy thing is that there was an original version when Kirinji offered the song to the aidoru group V6 to record as part of their 14th and final album "Step" from September 2021. The arrangement is slightly different but it's still a banger. "Suteki na Yoru" was apparently also used in the "Minna no Uta"（みんなのうた）kids' song show but the only footage I could find was in this cute kid's living room. In any case, V6 ended things well...the album hit No. 1.

From PR Times

Ah, PS here...since we are covering an R&B song, one of the commenters for a recent article mentioned that Disk Union will be releasing a book called "Japanese R&B Disc Guide" on February 10th 2026. This will cover the R&B from the 1990s up to today. Having witnessed the initial big boom at the end of the 20th century firsthand with singers such as Hikaru Utada, m-flo, and Misia, I think it would be interesting picking this one up.