Article Contributed by Big Hassle Media
Published on January 19, 2026
Today, acclaimed guitarist Mateus Asato announces his debut album ASATO, which is due out on February 27, 2026. To herald the announcement, he is also excited to share the first single from the album, “HENDRIX” – listen. Of the track, Asato shares:
“Everything started after a late night thought I had in my studio while trying to make another song for my debut album: “If Hendrix were alive today and we were friends… around the same age… how would he write an instrumental song?!”
After that, I had a song in 20 minutes. Everything simply just came out and I felt like a vessel receiving melodies from above. A unique experience.
But this thought only happened after reading two books of his biography. Being completely inspired by it — I had no choice but honor the greatest guitar hero in history in my opinion.
His passion & faith through music, his sense of feeling things. One of the things that captivated me the most about his books was the story that “he’d always use his broom while cleaning his house pretending it was a guitar when a solo was being played on the radio”. Jimi was an eternal dreamer. Jimi truly believed music had supernatural powers — and that’s why his legacy shall remain.
This song might not relate much to Hendrix’s music in technical structure, and that is not my intention here. This is just a title of gratitude to the one who changed my perspective of playing the guitar.”
For over a decade, Asato has been one of the most influential voices in modern guitar, yet his debut album, ASATO, represents a beginning far more profound than a simple collection of songs. It is a sonic reclamation of his name, his heritage, and his confidence to be his own frontman.
The title is no coincidence. For Asato, his surname was once a source of childhood friction—a marker of “otherness” that often replaced his identity in the eyes of peers. Today, ASATO stands as a proud affirmation of his Japanese ancestry. The seeds for the project were sown during a transformative 2017 trip to Japan, an experience that shifted Mateus’s perspective from being a premier sideman (Bruno Mars, Jessie J, Tori Kelly, Silk Sonic) to a definitive solo artist.
Spanning ten years of creative evolution, the album captures the puzzle pieces of Mateus’s identity. The tracklist travels from the earliest compositions like 2014’s “Change” to the final studio captures of “HENDRIX” and “Goodbye,” written precisely on December 14th, 2024. The result is a vivid sonic travelogue inspired by the landscapes of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hokkaido and his ancestral home of Okinawa.
The music itself defies the pressure to conform. In a world that often told him instrumental music was “missing something” without lyrics, Mateus explores the depths of melodic conversation. From the high-energy bursts of “Kyoto’s Jam” to the peaceful, spiritual resonance of his acoustic work, ASATO utilizes the guitar as a vessel for complex emotions that words often fail to capture.
“Sometimes the point of a message is its own subjectivity,” Mateus says. “Like an abstract painting with no description.” After twenty years with the guitar as his closest companion, ASATO is not just a debut; it is the sound of a musician finally arriving exactly where he is meant to be.
