Haruomi Hosono: Yours Sincerely

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Genre:

Electronic / Pop/R&B

Label:

Ghostly International

Release Date:

2026

Haruomi Hosono has been at the vanguard of pop music for the majority of his nearly 60-year career. He spearheaded Japan’s folk-rock boom in the 1970s with Happy End, sparked the synth-pop revolution of the 1980s with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and has written for, performed on, or otherwise contributed to thousands of records. But recently, the 79-year-old artist has been looking in the rearview. In 2019, he circled back to his country-inspired 1973 solo debut, Hosono House, and reworked it into Hochono House, which somehow sounded even more retro than the original. “I was curious to see if I returned to these songs now and played them with my current feelings, what would happen?” he said. It seems that he’s still got unfinished business.

Incomplete ideas continue to haunt Hosono like spirits in purgatory; on his 23rd solo album, Yours Sincerely, he puts them to a merciful rest. He has scoured the last couple decades of his catalog for rough gems in need of polishing, casting a wide net: music for film, television, and streaming video; commissions for department stores and clothing designers; even quixotic reimaginings of Liszt and Beethoven, making peace with the statue of Beethoven that sat in his grandfather’s room, scowling at him every day of his youth. The selection shows a more contemplative side to his craft rarely seen outside his freelance work, his tender heart exposed and beating in an unhurried waltz time.

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Ghosts of Hosono’s past are all over Yours Sincerely. One, “Rojiura (Walking Vibration),” is salvaged from a sparse instrumental he composed for the 2006 NHK drama Walkers: Maigo no Otonatachi, its snappy percussion now augmented with traditional iwabue flute and Hosono’s soft crooning. He gives an even more dramatic retooling to “Happy Holiday,” expanded from a short jingle for department store Parco’s 2024 holiday advertisements into an exuberant flurry of clamoring bells and electronically processed vocal harmonies. (“I’m not using any of that trendy AI technology,” he stresses in the production notes.) The swinging chanson-style ballad “Ayurveda” was originally a recurring motif for the 2008 film Good Good the Fortune Cat, then became a staple of his live performances with the duo KuKuKu; here, it sounds even more like a gentle daydream, leaning on Ikuko Harada and Manami Kakudo’s sweet harmonies to support his aging voice.

Hosono has long struggled with his dislike of singing. He stepped up to the mic for Happy End only because nobody else would, he told Red Bull Music Academy in a 2014 interview, adding, “I [still] don’t even want to hear it.” During the making of his 1978 album Paraiso, recording engineer Yasuhiko Terada recalls that Hosono was so embarrassed that he demanded to have the audio monitors turned off while he sang. Eventually, he discovered a way to boost his confidence: performing songs written by other people. Hosono’s voice is noticeably scarce on most of Yours Sincerely—he delegates to a children’s choir on “Note of Mothership” and sounds off through sealed lips on “Humming ‘Dream of Love’,” based on Liszt’s Liebesträume No.3—but he gives his best effort on the album’s lone cover, a rendition of the Moonglows’ 1954 doo-wop hit “Sincerely,” letting his smooth baritone ring in multitracked harmony, and singing new lyrics in Japanese, a treatment he’s given to favorite tunes since his legendary 1976 concert in Yokohama Chinatown.

There’s one genuine vintage find among the collection of new-old music. The toylike miniature “Anemo Wheel” dates back to 1984, created for a TV program whose name Hosono has long since forgotten. It stands in stark contrast to the luxe pop arrangements throughout the record, a simple loop created with primitive music software and played on the Prophet-5 synthesizer. A relic of the period when Yellow Magic Orchestra went their separate ways and Hosono struck out on his own, experimenting with novel technology, it’s a bittersweet rhyme with the current moment; he’s now the only surviving YMO member, his mortality likely on his mind as he carries the memory of his lifelong friends Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, both of whom passed away in 2023. Hosono shows no signs of stopping yet, but Yours Sincerely is a touching act of tying up loose ends.

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