ATARASHII GAKKO! Frame New Album Around Tokyo’s Global Pulse

The return home is rarely straightforward for touring musicians. For ATARASHII GAKKO!, it became the creative anchor for a new album. After taking their high-wire performances worldwide on the back of 2024’s AG! Calling, the Tokyo quartet—SUZUKA, KANON, MIZYU, and RIN—found themselves looking at their city with fresh eyes. “Tokyo has absorbed influences from across the globe and transformed them into something entirely its own,” they reflect, drawing a direct line to their own genre-bending approach. That re-evaluation crystallized into From Tokyo with Love, a record shaped by the city’s friction and collage.

The group will mark the album’s release with a headline show at London’s Roundhouse on July 19—exactly eleven years since their first gig in a tiny Tokyo tent. “We could never have imagined this,” they say of the milestone. The anniversary performance, they note, will hinge on an immediate, unrepeatable energy “that only the four of us can bring.” During their first London appearance in 2024, they observed an audience that seemed to embrace the performance on its own terms, a quality they’re eager to meet again.

Asked about British inspirations, vocalist SUZUKA points to The Chemical Brothers, a nod to the group’s own fixation on visceral, communal moments. That instinct—to privilege what’s born in a room over what can be reproduced—runs through the new album. From Tokyo with Love is less a postcard from a fixed place than a document of what happens when that place absorbs the world and transforms it into something singular.