Hoshino Gen’s ‘Cube’ Four Years On: The Angry Detour That Set Up ‘Seimeitai’

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Hoshino Gen’s ♪Cube♪ is quietly resurfacing on the edges of the chart. A song released in autumn 2021, still being played four years later. If anything, its real home in his catalogue is easier to see now than it was at the time.

Some songs can’t be described by a chart position. ‘Cube’ is one of them — the moment Hoshino Gen took down the ‘the nice guy of J-pop’ sign himself, and a turning point that only starts paying off in retrospect. It’s not hard for a gentle artist to keep singing gentle songs — what’s hard is dropping the temperature down near anger, and then finding your way back.

Key facts

• ‘Cube’ was released digitally on October 18, 2021 via SPEEDSTAR RECORDS.
• It’s the theme song for the Suda Masaki-led film ‘CUBE Ichido Haittara, Saigo’ (released October 22, 2021), written specifically for the film.
• Programming credits go to Hoshino Gen himself and mabanua — the beat is designed to sound like a live drum kit, but played by someone no human body could physically be.
• The music video was choreographed and directed by MIKIKO, with a cameo from Suda Masaki.
• It was Hoshino’s first song written for a film since ‘Doraemon’ for ‘Stand by Me Doraemon’ — a 2018 project — three years earlier.

Why ‘Cube’ reads differently in 2025

Start with the conclusion. The Hoshino Gen of 2025 and beyond — the one carrying ‘Seimeitai’ as the theme for the Asian Games and the World Athletics Championships, releasing the album ‘Gen’, pulling the band’s center of gravity back into the room for the big venues — that Hoshino Gen was built on top of a few specific songs. ‘Cube’ is one of them. At the time it got filed as ‘oh, the film tie-up one’. Line the catalogue up now and it sits somewhere else entirely.

On paper: digital release October 18, 2021, theme song for Suda Masaki’s ‘CUBE Ichido Haittara, Saigo’. Sounds like a normal tie-up gig. But the emotion Hoshino put at the entrance of the writing process was already off from how he usually spoke in public.

He’s said the anchor was the film’s core idea of surviving no matter what, and that he tried to lock ‘an exploding energy close to anger’ into the sound and the words. Read that again. The person who’d been carried to national-treasure status by ‘Koi’ and ‘Idea’ chose this temperature next, by his own hand. Miss that and everything he did afterwards reads about one layer too shallow.

Honestly? When I heard it in real time I filed it under ‘auteur experiment’ and set it aside. Came back to it three years later and got the wind knocked out of me. The story wasn’t the skeleton of the track. It was his temperature.

Anger as the starting spark — a rarity in his catalogue

Line up his signature songs and most of them run on ‘affirming ordinary life’ or ‘soft solidarity’. ‘Koi’, ‘Family Song’, ‘Idea’, ‘Sozo’ — every one of them designed to reach a hand toward the listener’s day. ‘Cube’ sits outside that lane.

In interviews he’s described the song as a new place he arrived at after facing down despair and something like anger. Tracks where the ignition point sits closer to anger — you can count them on one hand across his whole discography. And he chose to put this one in the most public possible slot: a film theme song. That’s a bold move. Read it as him refusing to do the hit playbook again.

The interesting bit: he doesn’t shortcut ‘anger’ into ‘shouting’. The vocal stays low, restrained, pinned to the floor of the mix the whole way through. Instead of raising the voice, he builds the pressure on the tempo side and the beat side. That design shows up again, refined, in ‘Fushigi’ and later in ‘Seimeitai’. This is the prototype.

Six arms and four legs: reading the beat

The core of this song is the beat. I’ll die on that hill.

What Hoshino has said about it is worth sitting with. At first he thought about pulling the drumming back to something a human could actually play. Then he flipped it — the interesting thing is precisely doing what a human can’t play. So he programmed it to sound like a live kit, but with the mental image of a drummer like a thousand-armed Kannon: six arms, four legs. That one line explains the whole song. Keep the physical, in-the-room texture of live drums. Cut the rules of human anatomy. That’s the trick.

Music-press analysis has broken it down as a beat that opens the song like drum’n’bass fused with a fast slip pattern, drops into half-time on the chorus, then folds in a two-beat-style rush and eight-beat feels on the bridge into the second verse — a shape-shifting structure you can’t really predict. If you’re just tracking the BPM, you’ll get lost. The skeleton keeps switching under your feet.

The credits list Programming as Hoshino Gen and mabanua. Since ‘POP VIRUS’, Hoshino has rotated top-shelf drummers — Kawamura ‘Kasuke’ Tomoyasu, Tamada Toyomu, Ishiwaka Shun, mabanua — through his sessions. On this one he chose the premise of not borrowing human hands at all. The choice to not have someone play it is itself the statement.

Three things to listen for

• The low center of gravity in the intro. A fast, drum’n’bass-adjacent pattern with a kick that keeps the body-thump of a real drum. Put headphones on and the placement wobbles slightly. That’s where the unease is coming from.
• The half-time flip on the chorus. The busyness suddenly drops by half and hands the space to the vocal. Your sense of time stretches out right there.
• The loose drum passage just before the final chorus. There’s a moment where the drums lock in unison with the melody, and that’s where the ‘this drummer has multiple arms’ setup is most visible. Every relisten, a different corner of it catches your ear.

‘Cube’ was, in hindsight, a trailer for ‘Seimeitai’

Time for the retrospective read, properly. ‘Cube’ runs on the same track as 2023’s ‘Seimeitai’. Not many people said this at the time, and there are two reasons why.

One. The backbone of ‘Seimeitai’ is a piano line by Hoshino and Ovall’s drummer mabanua, plus the physical drumming of Ishiwaka Shun. Ishiwaka’s involvement was his first since ‘Fushigi’ in 2021. And mabanua — the name that lands there — is also credited alongside Hoshino on Programming for ‘Cube’. Same beat co-architect on both.

Two. The ‘inhuman programming’ of ‘Cube’ gets answered in ‘Seimeitai’ by its exact inverse: hand it to Ishiwaka Shun, arguably the strongest live drummer working right now, and let him play it with all the human mess intact. Same design idea, flipped inside out. Play the two back to back and the resolution jumps up. Try it.

Line up ‘Cube’ → ‘Fushigi’ → ‘Seimeitai’ in order and Hoshino’s project of the last several years comes into view. Dissolving the border between live playing and programming, and staging ‘the physicality of the person hitting the drums’ as a compositional element. He’s held onto the mass audience he won with ‘Koi’ without giving up a millimetre of the musician’s exploration. That kind of consistency, from the outside, looks graceful. From the inside it must have been a chain of harder choices than it looks.

The single that fell in the middle of the album gap

Place it on the career map. ‘POP VIRUS’ came out December 19, 2018 as his fifth album, home to ‘Koi’, ‘Family Song’ and ‘Idea’ — one of the commercial peaks. His next original album ‘Gen’ arrives May 14, 2025. That’s over six years between them.

‘Cube’ sits inside that album gap. It’s a period where the outside noise was loud — his acting work (‘MIU404’, ‘Oomameda Towako to Sannin no Motto Otto’), the pandemic-era online activity, marriage. On the music side he’d entered a phase of testing things out via digital singles. ‘Fushigi’ (March 2021), ‘Cube’ (October 2021), ‘Kigeki’ (June 2022), ‘Sozo’ (January 2023) — line them up and the texture keeps changing. The width of the experiment is wide enough that you’d doubt they’re all the same writer.

Inside that stretch, ‘Cube’ is the one that swings farthest ‘outside’. Furthest from warmth and celebration. And I’d argue it’s because he went through this song that the softer ones that followed — ‘Kigeki’, ‘Sozo’ — carry a different kind of tensile strength. Once you’ve let the anger out, the celebration you write next isn’t the same as the one you would have written before.

How it fits the film — an answer to a thriller

A word on the tie-up itself. Writing a new song for a film was, for Hoshino, the first time since ‘Doraemon’ for the 2018 ‘Stand by Me Doraemon’ — three years earlier. So the first film brief he takes after that gap goes from a national animation franchise to a locked-room thriller remake. The swing in the pendulum is fun on its own.

He’s said in comments that after watching both the original and the Japanese version, he sensed he could write music he’d never made before. This isn’t just brief-and-reply. Give him a genre he hasn’t touched, and he’s the kind of writer who eats it once before he decides whether to walk away. You can see the same instinct in his variety-TV footing, the instrumental work of his SAKEROCK years, the acting, the essays. ‘Cube’ looks like the music-side version of that instinct in full display.

The MV runs on the same logic. Direction and choreography by MIKIKO — familiar from the videos for ‘SUN’, ‘Koi’ and ‘Doraemon’, and from his tour choreography. Cameo from Suda Masaki, star of ‘CUBE Ichido Haittara, Saigo’. With that team, the visual center of gravity slides from bright pop into the pressure of a closed room. Handing a locked-room thriller to a choreographer is the kind of soft-headed move I love.

What the writing does — reading the theme, not the lyrics

I’ve been all beat, all skeleton. A note on the theme, without quoting words. The way the song’s theme is set up reads as a direct response to the material of the locked-room thriller: the pushing-back inside an enclosed place, time, how to handle the past that’s already gone by. It traces the shape of the film’s plot without being pinned to it, so that it also works completely away from the film.

Hoshino’s writing habit isn’t to leap into ‘somebody inside the story’ and stand next to them. It’s to sit outside the story as himself, take the film in, and write from the emotion that moved in him. ‘Doraemon’ did this. ‘Sozo’ did this. ‘Cube’ does this. He doesn’t summarise the film, so the song still functions when you’re miles away from it. It’s craft. A tie-up doing the bare minimum of its job while keeping enough single-song strength to survive the years.

Retrospectively, that ‘from outside the body’ angle in the writing runs straight into ‘Seimeitai’ and ‘Fushigi’ too. Looking at the human body not from inside yourself, but from a step back, mechanism and all, and putting that into words. The center of Hoshino’s language over the last several years has clearly drifted that direction. ‘Cube’ is one waypoint along that drift — the point where the pendulum swings furthest to the outside.

Keyboard-and-DAW era

One more thing on the physical conditions of the making. By his own account, this one was built on keyboard and DAW. Not calling the band into the room and cutting it live — instead, program the beat first, layer his own instruments over the top, bring in outside musicians where needed. ‘Cube’ is one of the clearest showcases of that workflow after it settled in.

What this workflow buys you: you can throw out the human groove first and then reverse-engineer humanity back onto it. Start from a live band and you’re always partly dragged along by the players’ biology. Start from the DAW and you can build a skeleton that ignores biology, then paint human warmth onto it afterwards. ‘Cube’s six-arm, four-leg drummer is that idea made physical.

Through the late 2010s, most of Hoshino’s tracks were built assuming a band-based, live-feel core. ‘SUN’ and ‘Koi’ both had a live drum kit at the center. Around ‘POP VIRUS’ the weight starts to shift, and the pandemic-era making environment tipped it over decisively. Put ‘Cube’ as the poster case of that transition and you can redraw the whole map of his discography.

Probably a night song

A word on how it actually gets listened to. Not many people play ‘Cube’ in the morning, I’d bet. Its designed home is on the night side. Headphones on, room lights down, that moment where you want to take the weight of the day head-on before you put it down. The song’s low center and its over-programmed beat land exactly right in that slot.

Most Hoshino Gen songs work by lifting your day. ‘Cube’ goes the other way — it sits the heavy thing next to you and lets it stay heavy. Which is probably why it gets picked on tired nights. A lot of listeners, I suspect, keep it in a separate compartment of the playlist from the rest of their Hoshino Gen.

The chart, and everything the chart misses

On the numbers side: at release it charted high on the Billboard Japan Hot 100 and the download charts. But leaning too hard on rankings for this song, you’d drop the more important story.

Four years on, ‘Cube’ is the kind of song whose streams creep upward. Inside Hoshino’s catalogue it isn’t seasonal; it gets pulled back up by the state the listener is in. That kind of sustain is a completely different asset from the social-phenomenon hit that ‘Koi’ was. Chart positions are a snapshot. What this song has been building is the asset on the why-people-keep-playing-it side of the ledger.

Where to go next

If you’re spreading out from ‘Cube’, try ‘Fushigi’ (March 2021) next. Ishiwaka Shun on the kit — the ‘live drums side’ answer to ‘Cube’s ‘programming side’. From there, move to ‘Seimeitai’ (2023). Those three songs together give you the outline of Hoshino Gen’s approach to rhythm over the last five years or so. If you’re going back to an album, start with ♪POP VIRUS♪. That’s the one where he’s most nakedly a music fan himself.

The sound of someone who lost his temper on the way to kindness

One more pass with the retrospective lens. If you file ‘Cube’ as ‘the offbeat one from a film soundtrack’, you’ll stop being able to read the Hoshino Gen who comes after. The raw, big-venue physicality of ‘Seimeitai’. The mix of restraint and freedom that ‘Gen’ likely delivers. Both of them seem, from here, to have needed him to walk through this song first.

It’s not hard for a gentle artist to keep singing gentle songs. What’s hard is dropping the temperature down close to anger, and then walking back out. Autumn 2021 Hoshino Gen, I think, picked the harder route. Four years in, the effects of that pick are visible — I really do think so.

How each fan slots this song into their listening — that’s probably going to split. Some put it dead center of the playlist, some at the edge, some skip it. That split is, to me, the proof the song is still alive. Where do you keep ‘Cube’?