Between Two Sold-Out Rooms, AOTO Released 'Still Blond, Stay Gold'

In between, on 20 September, AOTO released the video for a new song, 'Still Blond, Stay Gold', built on a beat by Linna Figg of SATOH. Spincoaster describes a clip made from AOTO's everyday life, down to scenes of hair being braided, and reads it as the opening of a new chapter.

The year of Kiss My Life

The one-man shows follow Kiss My Life, the debut album released in February, and a spring tour for it that ended at Daikanyama UNIT in Tokyo on 29 May. Umeda CLUB QUATTRO's listing introduces AOTO as a rapper whose alternative sound has found strong support among younger listeners, which is about as much biography as the venue pages offer.

The Shibuya room had seen AOTO before. Nightlife Tokyo's listings put the rapper at WWW X on 13 May for WWW presents YOUNG PRO; four months later the same room sold out for a one-man show. In between came FLAG2026 at Spotify O-EAST on 11 July and club nights in Osaka, Fukuoka and Tokyo.

Seen from February, September looks like a plan carried out on schedule: an album first, then the rooms, then a new song to carry the name into the next round of bookings. Kiss My Life was about seven months old by the time the tour reached WWW X, and the video arrived before the Osaka date rather than after the run was over.

The weeks around the tour were crowded. Nightlife Tokyo lists AOTO at CIRCUS ODAIBA 2026 on 22 and 23 September, days after the Tokyo show, and the autumn holds two more dates under the POP YOURS presents Golden Age Tour banner, a six-act bill that OTOMO reports for GORILLA HALL OSAKA on 10 October and Zepp Shinjuku in Tokyo on 3 November.

What the listings add up to

Our Japan chart sees the same year from a distance. AOTO enters this week at number #27 / 30 among 226 scored artists in Japan, with a rising score of 76.3. The name was not on the chart a week ago.

The listings supply what a score cannot. Two venues in two cities sold every ticket for a one-man show, a festival booking followed days after the Tokyo date, and a touring package adds two more dates before the year is out. A chart registers all of that only as a line moving upward; the rooms say what the line is made of.

Our own event ledger saw part of the month. It caught the Tokyo night under its tour name, STILL BLOND at WWW X, and missed Osaka, which reached us only through the venue's own page and the music press. One documented date is what the chart had to work with; the rest of the picture on this page was assembled by hand.

What we are not telling you

Beyond the WWW X date on 18 September, everything here comes from venues, promoters and music press rather than from our own ledger, and we have no attendance figures beyond the sold-out notices. We have not described the shows themselves, because nothing we hold or could find records what was played on those nights or how the rooms responded.

We could not confirm a record label, and we found no chart or streaming milestones for Kiss My Life or the new single, so this page makes no claim about either. The score measures attention around a profile; it cannot tell a sold-out room from a busy feed, which is why the rooms carry the argument here.