Legendary musician, producer, and composer Haruomi Hosono today shares his new album, Yours Sincerely via Ghostly International. LISTEN HERE.

Hosono’s work has shaped pop, indie, and electronic music and beyond globally for over five decades, predicting entire lanes of music before they existed. The New York Times recently profiled Hosono in a piece around the new album proclaiming him as, “One of global pop’s most ingenious and provocative forces.”

Hosono will be heading on The Yours Sincerely Tour in North America headlining a show next week at Radio City Music Hall in NY followed by a headline show at the Greek Theatre in LA, his first US shows in seven years. Toro y Moi will support both performances.

Across arrangements spanning tender, exploratory folk and bubbling avant-pop, Hosono contemplates a maternal force that envelops the Earth, “humanity’s understanding of the unconditional love possessed by those who give us life,” he says. Songs tap into a collective current, the “deeply buried instincts—maternal compassion and mercy, things we rarely engage with in our daily lives.”

Speaking about the track Figlio Perduto Hosono shares, “Putting a symphony on my own album wasn’t something I’d ever really considered. But as I kept listening to the vocal versions (of the song), I started to feel like maybe I could pull it off, and this time I gave it a try with just guitar and voice. Funny thing is, only women seem to have ever sung the vocal version. I took that as a kind of maternal perspective and following that thread, I reached out to female voices like Miharu Koshi and KuKuKu to sing. For this album, I’ve ended up taking on three classical masterpieces – I wanted to deliberately show what happens when a generation of rock musicians, with all the rings of age stacked up, finally arrives somewhere new.”

Yours Sincerely was shaped over two years. Hosono shares, “It started with a simple question: how do you express the Japanese ideas of omoiyari (思い遣り), jihi (慈悲), or boseiai (母性愛) in 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. In Japanese, omoiyari also includes the feeling of ‘rejoicing together.’ In that sense, it may even seem like the opposite. The perspective, the emotional angle—subtly but fundamentally different. For that reason, I chose not to use ‘compassion.’ Instead, I turned to a more familiar word often used to close a letter: ‘Sincerely.’”

Shaped by mid-century American music, Hosono’s work now reverberates back through a new generation of Western artists—a remarkable circular exchange. Hosono has been cited by an acclaimed list of contemporary artists, including Mac DeMarco, Cameron Winter, Ginger Root, Vampire Weekend, and Harry Styles. Harry Styles named his chart-topping 2022 album Harry’s House directly after HOSONO HOUSE (1973), Mac DeMarco has called him his “hero,” and Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig sampled his work on the Grammy-winning Father of the Bride.

A founding member of Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), Hosono helped establish Japanese-language rock in the 1970s and pioneered electronic music with YMO—whose 1979 album Solid State Survivor topped the Japanese Album Chart, sold over two million copies, and became foundational to synth-pop, techno, and hip-hop.