On Yours Sincerely, Haruomi Hosono welcomes the conversation between the artist he has been and the musician he is still becoming. His 23rd studio album, brings ten tracks to his first collection of new music in more than seven years. Its subject is neither retrospective grandeur nor the reassuring wisdom of age. Instead, Hosono explores maternal compassion, mercy and the possibility of harmony in a world increasingly accustomed to isolation. The scale is intimate; the questions reach well beyond the individual.

As a founding member of Happy End and Yellow Magic Orchestra, Hosono helped reshape Japanese rock and electronic pop, yet his career has always resisted a single identifying sound. The mid-century American music that nourished his imagination now returns to him through younger Western artists, completing an unusually fertile cultural circuit. Admirers including Mac DeMarco, Cameron Winter, Ginger Root, Vampire Weekend and Harry Styles testify to the reach of a sensibility that makes sophistication feel disarmingly approachable. But Yours Sincerely is not built around that recognition. Its arrangements move between tender psych-folk and bubbling avant-pop, pursuing the sense that familiar musical pleasures can still lead somewhere unfamiliar. Hosono describes this impulse with striking candour: “I am now 78 years old, but from here on, I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self.” The past becomes a companion rather than an instruction manual.

The album’s maternal theme gives that curiosity an emotional direction. Hosono considers an enveloping force whose significance extends beyond private family experience toward the care that sustains human life. Several tracks feature female vocalists, a change he identifies as “a completely new approach for me.” Their presence is integral to the record’s imaginative world: group chanting expresses childlike wonder, oceanside hums mingle with prose, and an elegant marching arrangement offers another setting for the voice. These contrasting forms approach compassion without reducing it to a comforting slogan. They suggest something instinctive but neglected, a capacity buried beneath the routines and distractions of everyday life. Yours Sincerely finds its freshness in that act of attention. After five decades of invention, Hosono does not need to prove that he can surprise an audience. The more absorbing prospect is that he can still surprise himself, allowing new voices and old affections to change what a song might hold.