About Ado

Ado gives voice to a new era. Since debuting while still in high school, she’s captured the angst and cautious optimism of Japan’s younger generations, with soaring high notes to a signature snarl. In just a few short years, Ado has created and released career-defining hits and contributed musically to some of the biggest films in the country. The 19 year-old is an emerging force of the 21st century.

Born in Tokyo in 2002, Ado’s introduction to music was an encounter with Vocaloid, a singing-synthesizer software released in the late 2000’s, at a very young age. The technology, popularly personified by the virtual singer Hatsune Miku, allows anyone with the program and a computer to create their own digital singing voice. It revolutionized creativity in Japan and inspired a burgeoning generation of artists to not only cultivate the songs, but create the artwork, visual assets, and narratives around them too.

Ado became swept up in utaite, a Japanese term for someone covering Vocaloid songs with their real voice. Her distinct delivery — husky, and passion oozing out of every syllable — made her one to watch in Japanese pop scene. She featured as a singer on tracks by prominent producers in the space such as Whale Don’t Sleep on “Osmanthus” and jon-YAKITORY on “Shikabanese” which became early viral hits and illustrated her vocal range over different styles of beats.

Even as she started gaining attention, Ado wanted the emphasis and attention to be on the music. In line with the ethos of the utaite community, she used an anime-style avatar to represent her.

That would soon be the case with her 2020 major label debut “Usseewa.” The thunderous song, which finds Ado verbally broadsiding modern Japan and its tendency to marginalize younger people, became an online hit, thanks in part to Ado’s screaming of the title, which translates to a harsh “shut up” directed at polite society. “Usseewa” topped multiple streaming charts in the country, soared to hundreds of millions of YouTube views and cemented itself as a defining number of the early 2020s.

Follow-up singles “Readymade,” "Gira Gira" and “Odo” flexed greater sonic diversity while still spotlighting Ado’s vocal force. Most impressively, she did all of this through only digital singles and streaming, a first for a new artist in Japan, a country still focused on physical sales. It was the first time an artist topped the Oricon’s year-end sales chart for new artists without a proper physical release, underlining that Ado was ushering in a new era of Japanese music.

Her 2022 debut full-length album Kyougen became one of the year’s biggest hits, topping both physical and streaming charts. That led to her first live show ever, a sold-out evening at Zepp DiverCity in early April.

A few months later Ado would crossover into the film world contributing the female vocals to the character UTA in the smash film ONE PIECE FILM RED, the latest full-length offering from the globally beloved ONE PIECE series. For her original songs, Ado teamed up with a wide variety of established J-pop creators — including Yasutaka Nakata (Perfume, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu), Vaundy and Mrs. GREEN APPLE. — to further experiment with her sound, delivering both arena-ready anthems and emotionally rich ballads.

The latest ONE PIECE movie — prominently featuring Ado’s voice — currently stands as the highest-grossing film of the year in Japan. Ado’s songs similarly enjoyed huge attention. She made history on Billboard JAPAN’s JAPAN HOT 100 with six songs from the album in the top ten, a first. The driving centerpiece, the film’s theme song “New Genesis” landed at number one on Apple Music’s Top 100: Global chart, while also breaking into multiple countries' individual streaming charts.

Ado performed her second-ever live show, a sold-out extravaganza at Saitama Super Arena, one of the largest venues in Japan. And this is just the beginning. As her generation comes of age, they will look to Ado as a guiding figure to sing about life’s triumphs and overcoming challenges. Ado is ready to take on the challenge.