On the night of the Fourth of July, fireworks over Mei Semones' Brooklyn block were competing with something more primal. Up and down the street, dogs answered each burst with a long, ragged howl of their own. Semones, alone in her apartment with her guitar while the rest of the city celebrated outside, found she didn't mind the solitude. The howling struck her less as a cry for help than as a kind of greeting: proof that she was never really by herself, not with music always keeping her company. By morning, she had the seed of the title track for her sophomore album, Howl.

"Sometimes making music feels like howling into the universe," Semones says. "I make music because I like it, because it feels instinctual — but it also connects me to people close and far. I like to think of this music as my howl."

It's a title that might invite a familiar story of pressure and release, but Semones sees songwriting differently. Nothing was bottled up, she says, waiting to come pouring out. Music is simply something she does, every day, because it feels natural to her. That idea runs through Howl, an album that embraces the full range of her experiences rather than settling into a single emotional register. Tenderness and joy coexist with grief, self-doubt and memories of loss — the same range audible in a sound that can move from delicate fingerpicking to distorted, rhythmically restless swells within a single song.

At 26, the Brooklyn-based Japanese American guitarist and singer-songwriter — already named an Artist to Watch by The New York Times and Stereogum, and Artist You Need to Know by Rolling Stone and The FADER — has developed a sound that brings together jazz, bossa nova, samba and grungy math rock without treating any of them as separate worlds. Her bilingual songwriting works in much the same way. Few songwriters weave between languages as naturally as Semones does, slipping between English and Japanese within the same song — sometimes the same line — and letting both languages become part of the music itself. As she puts it, writing in both languages "felt more true to myself."

Growing up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Semones began playing piano at age four on an instrument gifted by her Japanese grandmother before picking up electric guitar at 11, inspired in part by Marty McFly's performance of "Johnny B. Goode" in Back to the Future. Semones also spent summers as a child in Yokosuka, Japan — where her grandmother lived — attending a local elementary school for two weeks each year and spending long afternoons catching cicadas, playing soccer, building things with mud, and searching for rhinoceros beetles. Those unhurried childhood experiences would later shape her 2024 EP, Kabutomushi, named after the very beetles she would catch with her school friends in Yokosuka.

In high school, she was introduced to jazz through greats like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Wes Montgomery, and around the same time she discovered bossa nova through João Gilberto's recordings. She later studied music with a focus on guitar at Berklee College of Music. 

After college, Semones balanced music with long workdays at a Japanese preschool in Brooklyn as she developed the distinctive musical language that first emerged on Kabutomushi and continued to expand on her 2025 debut album, Animaru — her last release before signing with Verve Records and Interscope Records. Joining Verve puts Semones under the same roof as the records she grew up studying: Gilberto's Getz/Gilberto, Montgomery's Smokin' at the Half Note, and Powell's The Genius of Bud Powell. The wider Verve umbrella also houses Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, placing her squarely in the lineage that shaped her playing. Seventy years after its founding, Verve remains the home for artists who treat jazz as something to build on rather than preserve — and Semones, the newest name on the roster, arrives as proof the tradition still has somewhere new to go.

Where Animaru celebrated her independence and the many forms of love surrounding her, Howl moves further into the complexities of being alive: the difficult memories, the fleeting joys and the ordinary moments that can carry surprising emotional weight.

On "Senro" ("Train Tracks"), Semones confronts difficult memories from her teenage years, the song drawing from experiences she has said felt scary to share with the world. Elsewhere, "Chichibu" looks toward a more joyful memory, capturing the warmth of a trip to Tokyo and the Chichibu Night Festival. "Kira Kira" ("Sparkle Sparkle") turns Japanese onomatopoeia — koro koro, niko niko, pika pika and fuwa fuwa — into playful expressions of romantic devotion.

On "Akumu" ("Nightmare"), Semones turns the guitar itself into part of the storytelling. The song explores the feeling of imposter syndrome through intricate guitar lines that mimic the physical actions described in the lyrics, from switching off a light to riding a train and drifting into sleep. On "2 Hands," a song about committing her life to music, drummer Ransom McCafferty suggested incorporating tabla, expanding the percussion palette of her music for the first time.

Those arrangements — recorded at Power Station, the historic Manhattan studio that hosted landmark sessions for artists from Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie to Tony Bennett — come alive through the dynamic chemistry of Semones' full ensemble. Her voice and guitar remain at the center, but viola player Noah Leong, violinist Claudius Agrippa, bassist Noam Tanzer and McCafferty create a wider musical landscape around them. On "Towards Manhattan," a love song inspired by waving goodbye to a friend at the Marcy Avenue subway platform, the arrangement is stripped down to guitar, vocals, violin and viola. That understated intimacy reflects her broader approach across the record. For Semones, music does not need a dramatic breaking point to matter. Like the dogs whose howls inspired the album’s title, she simply answers the world in the language that comes to her most naturally.

Howl, the second studio album by Mei Semones, is out on January 15th via Verve/Interscope