Ado was recently walking through a music store in Taipei and saw her latest album on a huge display. “I thought, ‘The staff who made that display have no idea I’m here right now.’ But I’ve got used to that feeling. It makes me happy.”
The Japanese pop singer is a superstar in east Asia and online – 10 platinum-selling singles, and more than six million global monthly listeners on Spotify – but Ado’s identity is a closely guarded secret. She never appears in photos or videos, and at concerts only her silhouette is visible. During our video interview, her camera is off. She’s an engaging conversationalist and powerful live performer, but clearly something of an introvert. “No one knows anything about my personal life, so it was a shock to hear my own voice playing in public places at first,” she admits, as she gears up for her first overseas tour, which reaches the UK this month.
After coming up as a bedroom artist, the day before her 18th birthday in 2020 she released her debut single Usseewa to huge and instant success, racking up nearly 170m Spotify streams to date. The song title means “shut up”, and features a brash punk tempo, lyrics that question authority and Ado’s piercing screams. It hit a raw nerve in Japan, where social pressure to conform is extreme, and Ado was branded the voice of non-conformist gen Z. “Usseewa was a song about rage, sung by a female singer with a [raw] voice like mine, and I guess that seemed rare at the time,” she says.
She doesn’t write her songs, but she performs them with relish, hitting notes in over four octaves and bringing lyrics to life with the enthusiasm and dramatic vocal range of an anime voice actor. Indeed, Ado uses an anime-style avatar in lieu of an artist photo and provided the singing voice of a pop-idol character named Uta in the 2022 animated movie One Piece Film: Red (the synthwave-tinged spin-off single from that film, New Genesis, hit No 1 and is her biggest hit to date).
Her musical awakening dates to four or five years old, when she became hooked on Vocaloid music: software with synthetic voices that can be made to sing anything. She cites virtual pop singer Hatsune Miku, an animated avatar of a 16-year-old girl whose voice is brought to life with the technology, and who “performs” as a projection alongside a live band in front of thousands of screaming fans. “When I heard voices such as Hatsune Miku’s for the first time, it felt … not uncomfortable, but unusual,” says Ado. “I wanted to understand what was behind that strangeness. I couldn’t understand whether it was anime or a human being, or who made the music. That air of mystery made me want to learn more.”
She began singing covers of Vocaloid songs, and the software’s eerie synthetic-human quality informed her mysterious identity. She found “there are some things that only a Vocaloid can sing,” referring to the super-fast delivery or impossible vocal range of virtual singers, but rearranged them for her human voice. She caught the attention of producer Syudou with her vitriolic 2019 cover of his song Jama, and he went on to write and produce Usseewa. Since then she has expanded her creative team and used her songs to explore the struggle to overcome self-doubt. On Gira Gira, she sings “when God drew my face he used his left hand”, but later finds empowerment in refusing to fit in with the demands of judgmental society; on I’m a Controversy, she argues that being labelled a “problem child” is actually a badge of pride. She says she’d like to try covering a song by Billie Eilish, who has been similarly candid about her self-worth.
The decision not to show her face might appear to be tied up with that struggle, but it’s actually done to align with the Vocaloid scene, and to focus more squarely on her artistry. “When I perform live, it’s about what can be expressed purely through the songs, the lighting and my silhouette,” she says. “I hope audiences overseas can enjoy this new kind of culture.”
Ado typifies Japan’s gen Z: a more individualist and progressive group than millennials, they are trying to defy endless recession and collapsing birth rates. “It really feels like times are changing,” Ado says. “When I was a kid, I had hopes for the future, but the future we’ve got is different – for better and for worse. As a high-schooler, I felt so much angst. I’ve been lucky enough to achieve my ambitions, but a lot of young people in Japan might not even know what their ambitions are. The unknown future fills them with anxiety, and even the prospect of a normal life feels stifling. You see this online especially, with so much toxicity and so much information overload.
“I hope the future brings more opportunity for people to live how they want to live. I’m still young, but through my music, I want to light the way and offer hope to others.” As AI looks set to erode employability, and create artificial pop stars that make the Vocaloid singers look positively quaint, Ado is firm. “There are some things,” she says, “only a human can do.”
• Ado performs at Troxy, London, on 13 March
