Electronic wizard Hakushi Hasegawa’s next experiment? Forming a band

H akushi Hasegawa had spent too much time alone.

The 27-year-old Tokyo artist has spent nearly a decade exploding familiar sounds into alien forms, slamming frantic keyboard melodies against pulverising percussion and their own digitally warped vocals to create works that hide pop hooks beneath the musical maelstrom.

That vision earned them praise from listeners in Japan and beyond, leading to Hasegawa becoming the first Japanese musician to sign with American electronic label Brainfeeder, where they released the album ‘Mahogakko’ in 2024.

“But it was something I made entirely by myself, sitting in front of my computer the whole time,” Hasegawa tells NME about their prior release over a late-night video call from their home in early August.

“It had become really difficult to step outside my own vocabulary, so to speak.” So for the follow-up ‘Honest Feeling Album’, out this week, Hasegawa formed a band.

They found players to form an outfit dubbed HaHa And The Hairpins, adding extra punch to their sketches.

The resulting set features more force from guitars, percussion and horns, with songs such as ‘The Owner Of Sweetness’ bordering on a metal chug.

Hasegawa’s wonkiness remains intact, but working in this setting led to surprises and challenges in equal measure.

“Since it’s actual people playing, and those people are…kind of eccentric people, all sorts of wonderfully strange sounds kept coming out of it, and that was really fun,” Hasegawa, who identifies as non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, says.

“At the same time, there was also a real difficulty in making judgment calls.

Like, is it OK to force this delightful, funny sound into my own texture or not?” While considering others, ‘Honest Feeling Album’ still comes across as a fittingly pure expression of where Hasegawa is at as an artist.

The rock and electronic whirlwinds are joined by dives into more vulnerable dance-pop, deceptively cheery bossa nova and more.

It’s unpredictable, which Hasegawa revels in.

H asegawa first came to music as an extracurricular activity, as their parents had them take piano lessons at a young age.