🎹 At 78, Haruomi Hosono is about to walk onto the stage of Radio City Music Hall. The Yellow Magic Orchestra co-founder — a man who has been quietly worshipped by Mac DeMarco, sampled by Vampire Weekend, and namechecked in a Harry Styles album title — has announced his 23rd studio album "Yours Sincerely" and his first U.S. shows in seven years. Here's why one of Japan's most influential musicians keeps getting bigger overseas, not smaller, as he heads into his eighth decade.

A new album, worldwide, on September 11

Hosono's new record "Yours Sincerely" arrives September 11, 2026, on Ghostly International — the long-running Ann Arbor, Michigan indie label that has championed artists like Tycho, Phantogram, and Matthew Dear. In Japan, the album comes out through Echoes, the Sony Music label that also houses YOASOBI and Kitani Tatsuya. Ten tracks. Vinyl, CD, cassette, digital. A deluxe box edition stuffed with art sheets, postcards, letters, a magnet, and even a pencil set.

The seed of the album, Hosono explained, was a translation problem. How do you put the Japanese concepts of omoiyari (思い遣り, thoughtfulness for others), jihi (慈悲, mercy), and boseiai (母性愛, motherly love) into English?

"I searched, but no word felt quite right. Each came close, yet carried a slightly different nuance. Perhaps the nearest was 'compassion.' It is often translated as omoiyari in Japanese, but its original meaning is 'to suffer together.' It tends to carry a sense of sympathy or pity — something that feels distinct from the Japanese sense of omoiyari."

That tension — between languages, between two musical selves — runs through the project. The tracklist alone reads like a small atlas: "Note of Mothership," "Ayurveda," "M for Mandala," "Rojiura" (a Japanese word for back alley), "Humming 'Dream of Love,'" "Figlio Perduto" (Italian for "lost son"). Religion, philosophy, nostalgia, and four or five languages, all rubbing shoulders.

On his age, Hosono offered this: "I am now 78 years old, but from here on, 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 cover art was painted by visual artist Harune Horigome.

Two shows, two legendary rooms

The album release comes with The Yours Sincerely Tour — Hosono's second-ever U.S. tour and his first American shows since 2019.

  • Wednesday, September 16, 2026 — Radio City Music Hall, New York
  • Sunday, September 20, 2026 — The Greek Theatre, Los Angeles
  • Both shows with Toro y Moi (Chaz Bear) as the opener

The scale-up is striking. In 2019, Hosono played two nights at New York's Gramercy Theatre (capacity around 500) and one at the Mayan Theater in LA — all sold out. That LA show became a moment of indie-rock folklore when Mac DeMarco walked out to duet with him on "Honey Moon," a 1975 Hosono solo cut.

Seven years on, the rooms are an order of magnitude bigger. Radio City Music Hall, opened in 1932, seats around 5,960 — an Art Deco landmark perhaps best known to global audiences as the home of the Rockettes' Christmas Spectacular. The Greek Theatre, an outdoor amphitheater nestled into Griffith Park, holds about 5,900. For an artist who sings and plays in Japanese to headline either venue, let alone both, is rare. To do it at 78, with a tracklist that includes a song called "Ayurveda" and another in Italian — rarer still.

Tickets go on general sale starting May 26 (local time). Details and presales are listed on the official Live Nation event page.

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Why Western musicians keep falling for Hosono

In Japan, Hosono is a foundational figure — the bassist of folk-rock pioneers Happy End, the laid-back hub of the Tin Pan Alley session crew, and one third of YMO, the synth-pop trio (with the late Ryuichi Sakamoto and the late Yukihiro Takahashi) that everyone from Kraftwerk to early hip-hop producers had to grapple with.

Abroad, the story has played out a generation behind. He isn't quite a peer — he's a treasure suddenly unboxed. The pivot point was 2018, when Seattle's Light in the Attic Records reissued five of his then-rare solo albums — including the 1973 debut "Hosono House" — outside Japan for the first time. The dam broke from there.

  • Mac DeMarco, the Canadian indie singer-songwriter, once described Hosono as "the main reason I've continued making music since I was, like, 19." He covered "Honey Moon" and crashed the stage in LA.
  • Vampire Weekend sampled "Talking," a piece Hosono originally composed as in-store background music for the Japanese minimalist retailer MUJI, on their 2019 song "2021."
  • Harry Styles revealed in a 2022 Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe that his chart-topping album "Harry's House" was named in tribute to "Hosono House."

Frieze magazine has called him "probably the most significant artist in the history of Japanese popular music." It's not modest praise. It's also not really an exaggeration.

And in a neat piece of inter-generational symmetry, Toro y Moi — a foundational chillwave and indie R&B artist himself — is opening both U.S. dates.

After city pop, the source code

If you've been following the global Japanese music revival of the last several years, much of it has flown under the "city pop" umbrella — Mariya Takeuchi's "Plastic Love" racking up hundreds of millions of YouTube plays, Tatsuro Yamashita and Miki Matsubara discovered by listeners who weren't born when the records came out, and a recent breakout for guitarist Masayoshi Takanaka, whose sold-out 2026 world tour reaches the Hollywood Palladium and London's O2 Academy Brixton.

Hosono sits upstream of all of that. He helped invent Japanese-language rock in the late '60s through Happy End. He produced and played on a lot of the foundational records of what later got labeled city pop. He pioneered Asian electronic music with YMO. He then kept going — into ambient, exotica, electronica, environmental music — long after most of his peers had stopped trying anything new.

His overseas footprint is also expanding methodically, not in viral spikes. In July 2025, he played London's Southbank Centre, his first UK solo concert in seven years, to a sold-out hall. In 2024, his 55th-anniversary celebrations rolled out pop-ups in Tokyo, Paris, London, and Amsterdam. The 50th-anniversary reissue of "Hosono House" has sold more than 10,000 copies worldwide on vinyl alone — a striking number for a record originally released in 1973.

A circle that closes in Yokohama, too

Before he flies to New York and LA, Hosono is also marking another anniversary closer to home. From May 22, a pop-up titled "HARRY HOSONO & TIN PAN ALLEY IN CHINA TOWN 50th Anniversary POP UP" opens in Yokohama's Chinatown, commemorating the legendary 1976 Tin Pan Alley show he played at the Dohatsu Shinkan restaurant there. A new vinyl release of that 1976 concert, "HARRY HOSONO & TIN PAN ALLEY IN CHINA TOWN," will be sold first at the pop-up before going on general sale June 24.

A live recording made in Yokohama Chinatown in 1976, going on sale in 2026 — and then, three months later, the same man on stage at Radio City. That kind of arc isn't engineered. You don't really plan it. You just keep working long enough, and one day Mac DeMarco, Vampire Weekend, and Harry Styles all turn out to have been listening.

What's it like in your country?

In Japan, Hosono has been a steady presence in pop and pop-adjacent music since the early 1970s — never quite the biggest star in the room, almost always somewhere near the center of whatever was actually interesting. In the West, the same body of work hits like a discovery: rare records, obsessive admirers, a slowly building cult. The same songs, two completely different climates.

How did Haruomi Hosono first reach your country — through YMO, through Happy End, through the city pop revival, or through someone like Harry Styles or Mac DeMarco namechecking him? Let us know in the comments.

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