Kenshi Yonezu entered 2025 as one of the biggest musicians in Japan: a style-blurring artist for all generations, a J-pop trailblazer breaking records at home and serving as the genre’s latest ambassador to the world outside it. But, as the 34-year-old tells it, the last 12 months were a chance to return to his roots.
“Ever since I finished working on my last album, 2024’s ‘Lost Corner’, I’ve felt I’ve come to terms with and let go of many things. It’s a comfortably liberating sensation,” Yonezu tells NME. “Holding on to that feeling, I spent this year trying to go back to how I felt as a kid. I reflected on the times I spent alone in my bedroom making music and tried to recapture that pure, childlike enthusiasm I had back then.”
Yonezu didn’t retreat from the spotlight, but rather turned new sonic ideas into some of 2025’s biggest J-pop smashes. He started the year with the electronic-inspired pair of ‘Plazma’ and ‘Bow And Arrow’, songs centred around synthesiser melodies and club-ready kicks. He achieved even greater success with the frantic ‘Iris Out’ this past September. Serving as the opening theme song to the blockbuster anime film Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc, it’s a whirlwind dance-pop cut featuring a flurry of vocal samples and a jazzy EDM breakdown. ‘Iris Out’ broke the Spotify Japan record for most streams on the day of its release, and has topped the Billboard Japan Hot 100 for nine weeks in a row at time of writing, a personal best for him.
“I wanted ‘Iris Out’ to be like a free-fall ride, starting with a jolt, racing straight ahead and then stopping abruptly,” he says. “I was very conscious of giving it that kind of decisiveness.”
It’s not a combination that typically leads to a hit in the country, but throughout his career, Yonezu has bent the mainstream to his sound. He first attracted attention in the early 2010s in Japan’s Vocaloid scene – the online community built around the singing-synthesiser software of the same name – under a different moniker. As Hachi, Yonezu made frantic rock songs with digi-vocals in his bedroom, delivering surreal and achingly personal lyrics.
He began releasing music under his birth name in 2014 and started making history just a few years later. The clip for his 2018 single ‘Lemon’ remains the most-played music video from Japan on YouTube, while 2022’s ‘Kickback’ (the “rollercoaster”, as Yonezu puts it, that was the opening theme for the Chainsaw Man anime series) became the first Japanese song to ever be certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America.
How does Yonezu create songs for anime and movies? “I begin by identifying something in the work that resonates with my own life. I drive a needle into its core, and let the rest of the song unfold naturally,” he says. “Once that needle is in, the song is about 80 per cent complete. But if that needle is off even slightly, the song will never work, no matter how much effort I put into it. That’s why I place so much importance on the positioning of that first step.”
‘Iris Out’ captures Yonezu’s ability to plunge into a work and create something apt for it while retaining his musical flair, here capturing the topsy-turvy electronic sound found in many Vocaloid songs. On the other end is the plaintive ‘Jane Doe’, Reze Arc’s closing number and a passing-of-the-torch moment of sorts. On it, Yonezu – one of the biggest names in Japan’s current Reiwa Era – collaborates with Hikaru Utada, who is arguably the biggest J-pop performer of the preceding Heisei Era (1989 to 2019).
“I reflected on the times I spent alone in my bedroom making music and tried to recapture that pure, childlike enthusiasm I had back then”
“At first, I thought it probably shouldn’t be me singing. My male voice didn’t feel at all appropriate for the ending of the movie. I had a strong sense from the start that the song needed to be led by a female voice to work properly,” Yonezu says of ‘Jane Doe’. “I really like the duet ‘I’ve Seen It All’ by Björk and Thom Yorke from Dancer in the Dark. I felt that kind of nuance would fit perfectly, and started creating the song with that in mind.”
He tinkered with various versions of the song, but eventually believed a duet with a melancholic and dark vibe would fit best. “I was thinking it had to be Utada. My personal impression of their voice is that it can be melancholic, wistful, and lonely, while at the same time, it has a freshness that sweeps through like a breeze. They have both qualities. Also, when listening to their music, there’s a sense of being overpowered by their immense talent and the brilliance of their songs and voice. There’s both a tremendous presence and a certain ethereality in their inner world. I even felt that without that duality, the song wouldn’t work.”
Yonezu knows something about duality, having changed the fabric of J-pop in the last decade as the first prominent Vocaloid creator to go from an internet space to the mainstream. He brought the unpredictability and sonic curiosity of that online world to a greater audience, and helped pave the way for the likes of Ado and former NME Cover act YOASOBI – among others who got their start in Vocaloid or grew up with Yonezu. Those acts, too, have broken through to become central names in 2020s Japanese music, an era that has also seen them head out further into the world thanks to tie-ups with popular media franchises and stand-alone global jaunts. Earlier in 2025, Yonezu completed his first world tour, performing sold-out shows across Asia, Europe and North America.
Yonezu is beloved internationally as an eclectic maestro able to veer from rip-roaring rock built for hyper-violent franchises to contemplative ballads such as ‘Spinning Globe’, used in the end credits for director Hayao Miyazaki’s purported swansong, The Boy And The Heron. Reflecting that range of collaboration, he is the rare artist in fragmented times to connect with his country’s full demographic range, to the point he’s also the writer of one of this century’s biggest Japanese kids’ songs.
‘Jane Doe’, along with ‘Iris Out’ and newest single ‘1991’, written for the live-action adaptation of Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters per Second, further underline the range Yonezu brings to his work. They also show how diverse the sound of modern J-pop has become, at a time when the country’s musical output is enjoying newfound attention.
“I’m not sure why that is, but Japanese music does seem to carry far more information than songs from other countries. I’m not suggesting that Japanese songs are more passionate or have a richer soundscape. It’s simply that far more sounds are used,” Yonezu theorises.
His own ‘Iris Out’ provides a great example of this in action, the latest example of the creator finding a new angle on what a pop song can be, capturing the sonic atmosphere of Japan this decade in all its unpredictability. “I am conscious of the fact that I create music with a distinctly Japanese quirk to it. That’s something I take great pride in,” Yonezu says. “However, I don’t usually have any particular feelings about how people should listen to it. Whether people regard it as peculiar or if they resonate deeply with it, that’s fine with me. I’m simply happy if it sparks interest in any form.”
Kenshi Yonezu’s ‘1991’ is out now via Sony Music