GEN HOSHINO - Gen

Success always has two faces, and it's not a given that the prevailing one is the smiling one. Often it drains you, forces you to reckon with disproportionate expectations, and keeps you from facing your own art with the right distance. The solution? For Gen Hoshino, it meant slowing down, letting the golden moment that arrived with the huge wave of popularity during the years of "Yellow Dancer" and "Pop Virus" flow past, and pacing his releases toward a total rediscovery of himself and his own creativity. That's how almost seven years passed between the release of his previous album and that of "Gen", titled after his own name as if to signal a kind of rebirth and repositioning, for a musician (and also a fine actor; the most hardcore cinephiles will undoubtedly have seen him in Sion Sono's "Why Don't You Play In Hell?") who has always been very curious and enterprising, but who with this latest project pushes his search several steps further. Shaped by an unprecedented spirit of collaboration, endowed with a funky soul that here reigns almost unchallenged, the new album is a testament to his own personal potential, to be cultivated at whatever pace it demands.

Slowing down, as we were saying. In the seven years between the two records, Hoshino nevertheless released various songs, plus a short soundtrack for "Lighthouse", a six-episode talk show on which he appears as co-host; a nice creative nest egg that the musician scattered carefully over the years, and which reaffirmed all the freshness and energy of a creative, sparkling pop rarely seen in Japan over the last decade.

From "Comedy", a colorful soulful midtempo track used as the closing theme of the popular anime "Spy x Family", through the carefree carousels of the opening "Create" (a flood of frenzied synths, drums in absolute top form, breaks and reprises, for a positively lethal prog-pop track) and the acid-jazz suggestions of "I Wanna Be Your Ghost" and "Star", the heart of the latest release cycle speaks clearly to the musician's blacker soul, from the vantage point of a typically Japanese melodic sensibility (bright and lively in the inflections of the verses and choruses), able to blend every reference and influence into a prism as multifaceted as it is solidly coherent internally, intimate and expansive within the span of a few minutes.

This is how the album avoids the compilation effect right from the start, and how the various collaborations (hugely varied in weight and pedigree, from the acclaimed trio of Cole/Gendel/Wilkes in the atmospheric fusion of "Mad Hope"; the old-school rap of Lee Young-ji; the Latin heart of Camilo in the sophisti-pop ballad "Memories") take on the proper weight of impact. This is how the character of the songs never falters, within the multiform harmony of a whole that doesn't shy away from seductive synth-funk fascinations (the "Melody"-"Fushigi" double bill), plays the acoustic card with success (the folk sketches of "Kurayami", reminiscent of the warmth of Motohiro Hata), and even offers unexpected nods to the new-jack-swing of old, treated with all due soulfulness ("Why").

However you look at it, "Gen" speaks of a musician who has found, in community and in slowness, the seed of his rediscovered expressive strength, carving out just under an hour of irresistible pop brio. Over fifteen years on from his debut, Gen Hoshino hits his most inspired moment right here.

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11/08/2025