After five years of quiet, Haruomi Hosono is ready to share something new with the world. The Japanese music legend has announced his 23rd studio album, Yours Sincerely, arriving September 11 via Ghostly International — and with it, a return to American stages for only the second time in his career.
The Yours Sincerely Tour will see Hosono perform at two storied venues: New York’s Radio City Music Hall on September 16, and the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 20, with Toro y Moi along for the ride. Back home in Japan, the album will be released across multiple formats — digital, CD, LP and cassette — with deluxe editions packed with art sheets, postcards, handwritten letters, pencils and magnets.
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Hosono’s 23rd Album To Date
Yours Sincerely is the follow-up to 2019’s Hochono House, a record that felt like a nostalgic conversation with his own past, namely his breakout 1973 album, Hosono House. According to Hosono, his upcoming release will be quieter and more outward-facing. Ten tracks long, paired with cover art by painter Harune Horigome, the album circles around themes like motherhood, compassion and the possibility of harmony in a turbulent world, he described in an Instagram post.
At 78 years old, he told Billboard, he finds himself carrying two selves at once: “I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self — as if I now carry two musical worlds within me.”
The full tracklist runs: “Note of Mothership,” “Sincerely,” “Ayurveda,” “M for Mandala,” “Rojiura,” “Happy Holiday,” “To a Wild Rose,” “Humming ‘Dream of Love,'” “Figlio Perduto,” and “Anemo Wheel.”
Image courtesy of Tower Records Japan Inc.
Who Is Haruomi Hosono?
To understand why this is a big deal, it helps to know just how long Haruomi Hosono has been making music — and how much of what we listen to today owes something to him. As a founding member of Happy End, as well as Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi, he helped shape electronic music in the late 1970s in ways that would go on to influence synth-pop, techno and far beyond. (Even Harry Styles has spoken openly about how much Hosono’s music has meant to him.) And if there’s a certain sense of destiny around Hosono’s place in history, perhaps it runs in the family: He is a direct descendant of Masabumi Hosono, the sole Japanese survivor of the Titanic.
Now 78 years old, and 57 years into a career that has never stayed in one place for long, Hosono comes to Yours Sincerely as an artist who is still genuinely excited about what he might make next.
