Hakushi Hasegawa Forms a Band for New Album 'Honest Feeling Album'
Tokyo electronic musician Hakushi Hasegawa has announced a new album, Honest Feeling Album, made with a newly formed band called HaHa And The Hairpins — the first time Hasegawa has recorded with a group rather than working alone. According to an NME interview, the album's starting point traces back to a performance on the Japanese live-session series The First Take.
From solo computer work to a full band
Hasegawa, 27 and using they/them pronouns, has spent nearly a decade building a reputation for warped vocals, dense keyboard melodies and fractured rhythms. In 2024 they became the first Japanese artist signed to the American label Brainfeeder, releasing the album Mahogakko. Hasegawa told NME that record was made entirely alone at a computer, and that stepping outside their own musical vocabulary had become difficult. For the follow-up, they assembled musicians as HaHa And The Hairpins to push their original sketches further.
Heavier, stranger, and harder to control
The results carry noticeably more weight from guitar, percussion and brass — the track The Owner Of Sweetness even approaches a metal-style low-end groove. Hasegawa's signature skewed textures remain, but working with live musicians brought both surprises and challenges: "because it's real people playing, and they're pretty eccentric people," Hasegawa said, also noting the difficulty of judging whether an interesting sound should be forced into their own arrangement. Honest Feeling Album also moves beyond the rock-and-electronic turbulence to include more fragile dance-pop and breezy bossa nova. "I consider myself the artist who most defies expectations," Hasegawa said.
From message boards to Brainfeeder
Hasegawa studied piano as a child and briefly joined a school festival band in junior high, but their real entry point was online — connecting with electronic music creators through message boards. They released their first track, "Hadairo No Kawa," in 2016, followed by a debut release on the Japanese online label Maltine Records the next year, then expanded into increasingly elaborate arrangements across subsequent EPs and their debut album.
In 2020, Hasegawa shifted direction with the cover compilation Bones Of Dreams Attacked!, featuring reworkings of J-pop hits and the Disney classic "A Whole New World." That unpredictable style also caught the attention of Western artists — Porter Robinson invited Hasegawa to take part in the 2020 online festival Secret Sky.
At the same time, Hasegawa's profile in Japan continued to rise: producing tracks for rappers, virtual artists and singer-songwriters, and handling remixes for acts including Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra. Around the time of Mahogakko, Hasegawa appeared on the one-take live performance series The First Take, whose regular roster includes names like YOASOBI, Hikaru Utada and Harry Styles. According to NME, that performance experience became the starting point for Honest Feeling Album.