International listeners have spent years discovering 細野晴臣 (Haruomi Hosono) late. On September 11, 2026, they can finally hear him in real time.
Yours Sincerely, his 23rd studio album and first in seven years, receives a worldwide release through Echoes in Japan and Ghostly International overseas. Hosono is 79. His professional career began 57 years ago. Those numbers explain the importance of the musician, but the reason to cover this album lies in its timing.
Outside Japan, Hosono’s recognition has largely travelled backwards. A Light in the Attic reissue campaign returned five albums from the 1970s and 1980s to international circulation in 2018. His first solo concerts in the United States followed in 2019. In 2024, Hosono House Revisited gathered artists including Akiko Yano, Cornelius, Mac DeMarco and Sam Gendel around songs first released half a century earlier.
A new audience was finding Hosono through the music he had already left behind.
The end of the delay
That route made sense. Hosono’s catalogue contains enough entrances for several generations: はっぴいえんど (Happy End), Yellow Magic Orchestra, Hosono House, electronic music, ambient works and film scores. Each rediscovery added another piece to an artist whose place in Japanese music had long been established.
It also created a delay. Overseas listeners often encountered Hosono as an influence, a rediscovered pioneer or the owner of an extraordinary back catalogue. His past kept arriving before his present.
Yours Sincerely changes that chronology. The album reaches Japan and the rest of the world on the same day. Five days later, Hosono will perform at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, followed by the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 20. Toro y Moi will appear at both concerts. The international audience no longer needs a reissue or another musician’s recommendation to catch up. The new record is already waiting for everyone.
Hosono gave this shift its clearest words when announcing the album. Then 78, he described a growing curiosity toward the “unknown music” his new self might create while continuing to embrace the music of his former self. He felt as though two musical worlds now existed inside him.
The previous album made that dialogue explicit. Released in 2019, Hochono House rebuilt his 1973 solo debut Hosono House and reversed its running order. Memory supplied the material. Yours Sincerely begins with a message addressed outward.
From omoiyari to “Sincerely”
The title grew from Hosono’s attempt to express omoiyari (思いやり) in English. He described the Japanese word as containing the experience of suffering together and the ability to share another person’s joy. Unable to find one English term carrying the same emotional range, he chose a familiar way of closing a letter: Yours sincerely.
The two advance songs make that intention tangible. “Sincerely” revisits the song recorded by The Moonglows in 1954. Hosono replaced its original love-song lyrics with Japanese words of his own, returning to the sense of something offered genuinely, from the heart.
“Note of Mothership,” released on his 79th birthday, opens the album. Hosono developed it from his recent reflections on a maternal presence embracing humanity and the Earth. The title plays on the image of a mothership while introducing the compassion that runs through the album’s stated intentions.
These songs carry old music, personal memory and new questions in the same movement. Hosono’s past remains present because he continues to use it.
For decades, the international audience had to catch up with Haruomi Hosono. Yours Sincerely requires no catching up. This time, we are here when the music arrives.
