Here’s what you need to know about them …

How did Yoasobi get into music?

Both members were exposed to music from a young age. Ayase reportedly picked up the guitar and dropped out of high school after forming the band Davinci in his hometown, Ube. The band would later move to Tokyo to pursue a larger audience, but never achieved mainstream success.

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She entered numerous music competitions and busked throughout high school with little success, until she landed a spot in Sony Music’s trainee programme in 2016.

How did Yoasobi form?

While performing with his first band, Ayase also began writing and producing vocaloid music, a genre that uses music software to generate vocals for original songs. In 2019, staff from Monogatory.com, a social media platform for publishing short stories, novels and scripts run by Sony Music Entertainment Japan, noticed his talents and offered him a contract that would see him produce theme songs and soundtracks for stories published on the platform, per Japan News.

Ayase was troubled by health issues since 2018 and, with Davinci making little progress, he jumped at the opportunity. When he was tasked to find an IRL vocalist for his songs, he came across videos of Ikuta, who released her first mini-album Rerise in 2018. He felt her sound was a perfect match for his music.

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The group practically became an overnight hit, with its first single “Yoru ni Kakeru” going viral on social media and eventually topping Japan’s Orion Combine Singles Chart and the Billboard Japan Hot 100. It was also the first song in Japan to accumulate more than 700 million streams – and became the country’s most-streamed song in the last five years.

What happened after the hit song “Yoru ni Kakeru” was released?

Yoasobi followed up the hit with six more songs in 2020 and performed at the prestigious NHK Red & White Year End Music Festival. The duo wouldn’t release its first album The Book, containing all seven songs, until January 2021, making the pair the first act ever in the music festival’s 71-year history to perform without releasing an album.

The two followed up their first album with the opening and closing theme songs for the second season of Netflix anime Beastars, “Kaibutsu” and “Yasashii Suisei”, respectively. The year 2021 also saw the release of Yoasobi’s second album The Book 2, and its first English EP E-Side, comprising English translations of the duo’s Japanese songs, including “Yoru ni Kakeru” to “Into the Night”, allowing them to reach an even wider global audience.

Yoasobi’s third EP The Book 3 was released in October last year.