“I think this album is like a living copy of myself,” Gen Hoshino tells Apple Music about his sixth studio LP, Gen. Audiences outside Japan were introduced to Hoshino largely through his 2022 single “Comedy”, which was used as an ending theme for the first season of hit anime Spy x Family. The song appears on Gen, which is Hoshino’s first proper album in some time, coming out over six years after 2018’s POP VIRUS. The curtain opens with “Create”, which was first heard as a single in 2021. This song brought about a major change in Hoshino’s way of thinking. “When you do music for a long time, you gradually develop something like a compositional theory. By the time you notice it, you’re already doing it unconsciously,” Hoshino says. “But when I wrote ‘Create', I resolved to determine for myself what is good or bad, what is interesting. How I compose music completely changed from that point on.” Another major change for Hoshino at that time was his production environment. “Originally, I wrote songs by singing along while playing guitar, then arranging from there. But I took the opportunity during the COVID pandemic to create an environment where I could make music by myself, using a keyboard,” he says. “I brought the audio of my band members’ performances into my software and learned to edit and mix everything by myself. Thanks to this, I’m now able to express my vision of my music without anything leaking out.” This album not only features audio recorded in a professional studio, but also sessions with Hoshino’s friends recorded in his home studio, as well as recordings Hoshino made in his bedroom. At times, he also tried dividing separate recordings measure by measure and interweaving them. “I wanted to make an album where various sounds were chaotically lined up, under the idea that all sounds—clean and dirty, old and current—are equal. In any case, this album only includes sounds I like,” he says. Gen’s 16 songs feature a diverse array of featured artists, including Louis Cole, Camilo, Cordae and Lee Youngji, as well as musicians from Japan and abroad. With some songs even experimenting with the novel technique of layering singing in different languages, there’s a strong sense of Hoshino’s attitude towards pursuing his own music without restraint. Hoshino laughs that his own name crowns the album, “for some reason or another”. He adds: “As I gradually made this music which I personally felt was good, the album became like a transcription of myself. In English, the word ‘gen' has all sorts of meanings, so I decided to go by my first impression that Gen was the best choice.” As that impulsive decision-making might suggest, Gen feels like an album by an artist playing with music more freely. Hoshino shares his thoughts on some of the album’s key tracks below. “Create” “I wanted to give this song a slightly different shape than the version I released in 2021. The original has vocals right from the start, but I wanted to begin with an instrumental section this time, and I thought I would play the main melody myself. When I got in front of my synthesizer in the studio, different melodies kept coming out. It was a lot of fun. As a result, this song was reborn in a totally different form. So I thought, let’s make this the first song.” “Mad Hope (feat. Louis Cole, Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes)” “After I changed the way I made songs, I was making music all the time—even when I was working as an actor, or when I was writing a book. I really wanted Louis [Cole] to play drums on one of the songs. I sent him a demo and told him, ‘It’s cool if you play what I put in, or if you arrange it—do whatever you'd like.’ What he sent back was absolutely incredible. From there, more and more elements came up which I wanted to add, and when I went to Louis’ house in Los Angeles, he put in some additional drums.” “Glitch” “This song symbolises the theme of sounds lining up chaotically. I crafted it little by little over the course of five years, centred around a recording I made with my band at a session around the same time as ‘Create’. I was so pleased with the pre-production demo, I wanted to use that without re-recording it. So I brought it in and edited aspects like Louis [Cole]’s drums and my software synthesizers and made it all messy. For the bass, I took the audio which Hama [Okamoto] recorded five years ago and a recording from 2025 and switched between them every measure. The opening sound is the startup sound of a vintage Mac, a Mactinosh Quadra. I’ve wanted a Quadra ever since I was in elementary school, and I was finally able to get my hands on one after 30 years of dreaming about it.” “2 (feat. Lee Youngji)” “I want to re-examine the relationship between lyrics and sound, so I’ve been continuously challenging myself for the last five years. For example, when I’m listening to Western music, even if I can't understand a song’s meaning on the first listen, I sometimes feel like these words must have been used there. I also wanted to write lyrics which could be felt in that way. Lee Youngji, who’s featured on this song, took my thoughts into deep consideration. He said, ‘I’m not confident about my abilities, but I want to rap in Japanese,’ and proceeded to write lyrics which used three languages: Korean, Japanese and English. I was moved.” “Memories (feat. UMI, Camilo)” “When the idea struck me to overlap singing in English, Spanish and Japanese at the same time, I thought I could do something ridiculously good. Hearing several languages at once would be chaotic, so maybe in theory it's something you shouldn’t do. But I decided that, with this melody, it would work out. Camilo and UMI live far apart from each other, but I feel like their hearts are connected. That distance comes out in the song.” “Sayonara” “This is probably the first time I’ve sung this low, so cheers [laughs]. When I sing in front of my computer at home, my voice naturally becomes quieter and the key becomes lower. I felt that was fresh and nice, so I kept making this song that way. The choir-like chorus came naturally. Previously, I restricted myself from singing without too much nuance, but this time, I just wanted to sing in a way I felt was good.” “I Wanna Be Your Ghost” “I’m obsessed with analogue synthesizers and have collected a lot of them, from vintage to new models, so I made a song that sounds like an analogue synthesizer convention [laughs]. Analogue synths are difficult to handle, but once you actually get a feel for them, you come to understand their workings and get obsessed. I especially like the synths made during the period where things were transitioning from analogue to digital. You can feel the desires of manufacturers wanting to force the unstable analogue sound to stabilise. Although they aim for a natural sound, sure enough, it sounds completely different, and I think that’s an original sound. It has a nostalgic, unique charm reminiscent of the pixelated graphics I saw on the NES as a kid.”