The Mad Scientist

Hikaru Utada’s twenty-five year retrospective project SCIENCE FICTION makes a case for the singer being one of Japan’s most forward-thinking, experimental artists.  

Hikaru Utada rarely speaks about their debut English album Exodus but in 2009, they provided a window into what, in hindsight, makes the album essential to understanding their artistry. "Exodus was a very experimental album. I was like a mad scientist working away in an underground laboratory", she said. "I had the time of my life but it was a very intense, introverted process".

I kept coming back to this quote and the album last year as Utada rolled out their twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective album and tour, SCIENCE FICTION. Though they debuted as a teen star at sixteen years old in 1999, Utada has transitioned into one of Japan’s most experimental artists. Today, at forty-two years old, the singer is unafraid to mix genres, seamlessly blending jazz with dark electronica beats or house music with yacht rock. Their most recent full-length album BAD MODE is one of their finest and freest. (For reference, check out “Somewhere Near Mersailles”, a simmering ten minute electronic track about having sex in a room with a view.) 

Utada began building this foundation with Exodus even if, at the time, very few knew what she was doing. “I don’t wanna cross over between this genre and that genre/ Between you and,” Utada sings as a thesis statement on the album’s interlude “Crossover”. 

For the past two decades since, Utada has been uniquely challenging to define. Their contemporaries are difficult to name. Perhaps the closest pop star to Utada’s influence is the Korean star BoA who debuted in Japan in 2002. Yet BoA’s music has never achieved the same freedom as Utada’s. Utada’s identity, too, as a non-binary musician (they prefer they/she pronouns) is also rare in Japan. So, too, are their frank lyrics about sexuality. Even within the Asian American diaspora, Utada (who grew up in New York) holds a unique position as one of the only nonbinary artists working full-time in Japan. 

SCIENCE FICTION, then, has a goal to remind us of Utada’s singularity as an artist. She does this through several points of connection: First, through the re-recording classics, including “traveling” and “Hikari” and, second, by curating a stunning collection of their most sophisticated tracks, dating back to their debut “First Love”. Taken together, the compilation and tour offer a rare moment of reflection from a musician who prefers to say very little about their artistry. 

Utada in a design by Spiber; Spiber’s Instagram.

Utada was never going to be a straightforward pop star, and that is likely due to her parents. 

Utada was born in New York City to Japanese parents who were influential in the music industry, record producer Teruzane Utada and enka singer Keiko Fuji. Their mother, they told Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview, gave up her career to be a mother. “I think everything I know about being an unapologetic individualist comes from my mother,” Utada said. “She walked away from a very successful career as a singer to move to New York and that’s where she met my father. I saw how beautiful a life carried out with that attitude is.” 

Utada was raised to be headstrong and from a young age, she was clear and concise about the music she wanted to make. “You don’t have to be Moby to use machines,” they told Teen People matter-of-factly in October of 2004, “There aren’t enough girls who [produce].” And when the hugely influential producer Timbaland tried to take creative control of Exodus, Utada was quick to push back. “I told him, ‘I have to write my own stuff,’ Utada recalled to the Washington Post that same year. “And he was like, ‘What do you mean? I have my own way of doing stuff.’ And I was like, ‘I have my own way of doing stuff, too.’” 

As she’s grown wiser, Utada’s creative impulses have reflected an interest in uncovering complex truths. She situates her mother’s death in 2013 with the juxtaposition of becoming a mother herself just two years later on the seminal album Fantôm” (2017). By BAD MODE, released in 2022, her songwriting had developed its sharpest teeth. I’ve always been most taken by her musings on loneliness and working through trauma, which she writes about openly on the album. “For now/ Committed to my therapy,” she sings on “Find Love”. “I train with Vicky three to five days a week/ Getting stronger isn’t easy, baby.” 

Yet you can trace this honesty back to Utada’s debut single “First Love”, which has always been a tearjerker told from the perspective of a teenager who’s just broken up with her boyfriend. Today, sung from the perspective of a mother in her forties, the song takes on a new poignancy. “Even if I fall in love with someone else someday again,” she sings in lyrics,“'I’ll remember to love ‘cause you taught me how.” Utada’s voice is deeper and raspier, hinting at the life experiences that come from motherhood, the death of her own mother, and divorce.

Throughout the SCIENCE FICTION TOUR, Utada lets the genius of her earliest tracks like “First Love” shine. A stunning run of “For You”, “DISTANCE” and “traveling” show how seamlessly her lyrics and production blend together. These tracks are still vibrant and highly innovative some twenty years after their release. I’m also drawn to “Keep Tryin’”, a popular track from her 2006 album “ULTRA BLUE”, that is elevated simply by  minor key changes. The tweak has highlighted the undercurrent of anxiety in Utada’s lyrics: “The truth is I'm hungrier than anyone/ Even hiding my confused feelings/ Every morning a mirror reflecting my weak, true face/ I want to destroy it.”

They work best, too, when they flip the script on their previous music. “Boku wa Kuma (I’m a Bear)”, a children’s song from 2006, is elevated by jazz instrumentation that lets Utada wink at the playful lyrics. “COLORS”, which Utada re-recorded in 2024,  becomes darker and more daring. (Utada also reworked “SAKURA Drops” and “Can You Keep a Secret” on the album compilation) Even songs that begin straightforward, like the new track “Electricity” are freed midway through to experimental jazz tracks. 

In her interview with Apple Music, Utada remarked that it’s been a deliberate choice to lean into what’s “weird” or “strange” in music. “I wanted to make sounds from zero,” they said about their interest in production. But they bristled at categorization, especially as a J-Pop artist. “I don’t see myself as something that has risen from J-Pop,” they said. Their influence has always been something wilder.  

Back in 2009, as she promoted her second English language album “This Is The One”, Utada admitted that she had grown tired of pop music. The conventions of American music bored her. She missed the freedom she enjoyed with Exodus. She was interested in getting back into the lab and seeing how far she could plunge into new sounds. 

“I am starting to feel the urge to make something really weird,” she said cryptically, “maybe on the next album.”. Utada wasn’t in the mood to compromise again.