Kaze’s first all-English album turns “prema,” supreme, selfless love, into pop with soft edges, tight hooks, and visuals that teach love by behaviour rather than speech.
Fujii Kaze’s third album arrives as a small, intentional English-language set released on 5 September 2025 through Republic/Universal Sigma/HEHN.
Apple Music clocks it at about 39 minutes, neat and light on its feet.
It’s called Prema, a Sanskrit word Kaze frames as a higher, selfless kind of love, and that single word sets the tone for everything that follows: devotion as daily practice, not performance.
In interviews this week he leans into that clarity; an English record he’s long wanted to make, and, in his words, a kind of love letter to English pop.
His phrasing turns more conversational without losing that soft, weighted piano touch, and the production trims fat for radio without sanding away the harmonies that made early songs travel.
Across the album, 250 handles a lot of the backbone; ‘You’ gets Greg Kurstin’s lift, and ‘Casket Girl’ carries Rob Bisel’s sleek pop-soul finish.
The singles map the album’s angles cleanly. “Hachikō” tells loyal love through a split-self parable on screen, with Kaze as both the one who waits and the one who returns; MESS directs, and the video premiered the day the song dropped.
“Love Like This” takes the opposite route, turning romance into an everyday ritual; Aerin Moreno directs a modern European story filmed in the South of France.
Kaze pairs the title song with understatement: he films “Prema” around Chiang Dao in northern Thailand, elephant-sanctuary sequences, simple framing, and premieres the video alongside the album on 5 September 2025.
Prema’s lyric book is deliberately plain-spoken, the message over the flourish, but there are lines that lodge.
“It Ain’t Over” is the record’s soft spine: piano and light percussion under a lyric that swaps goodbye for a kind of homecoming, “oh, we’ll all go back to the same home,” reassurance over drama.
“Okay, Goodbye” lets a near-throwaway phrase do the heavy lifting of release, “Gonna find me a really good life,” keeping the arrangement unfussy so the promise does the talking.
“Forever Young” closes on uplift: elastic bass, open hats, and stacked harmonies framing a plainspoken vow, “as long as we’re here / we’re forever young,” pulling the record’s optimism into a simple, communal hook.
How does it sound front-to-back? Lean drums, rubbery bass figures, plush keys, roomy stacks that leave air for ad-libs.
“Casket Girl” snaps tight around a bass line and gang-style shouts; “I Need U Back” is four-on-the-floor buoyant; “You” rises on Kurstin’s immaculate scaffolding without losing Kaze’s piano glow.
Even when the mix chases gloss, the chords read like him.
The videos play a major role as they show how this album thinks about love.
“Hachikō” plays faithful to Shibuya iconography as much as to pop myth; “Love Like This” is unashamedly straight-faced, which is exactly why the second-half turn lands.
“Prema” is the quietest move, rolled out to hit the album hour across time zones, a clean piece of campaign timing that suits the record’s tidy scale.
Reddit threads under the singles show fans who love the catchiness and acting in the “Love Like This” MV, and others who miss the more idiosyncratic phrasing of the debut era or wish the studio outro carried the same live-show lift; some debate diction or whether a U.S.-facing mix smooths the edges too much.
The same spaces note how “Hachikō” reads as the clearest bridge between old and new.
That tension feels healthy here; it’s the sound of a fanbase testing where pop polish stops and Kaze begins.
The English-album arc was baked in from June’s announcement, with “Hachikō” as the lead; by August, the love-story MV was doing the rounds in the press, and on release day the title track’s video and the album went live in tandem, with TV spots in Japan lined up to underline how the dual images in “Hachikō” translate on stage.
The short answer to the practical question, can a gentler record move big rooms? is yes.
Prema keeps the piano warm and the writing clean, lets the cameras stay close, and trusts that a chorus can feel like hand-to-hand care.
If you want the loudest fireworks, they’re not here. If you want a clear, steady glow, they’re everywhere.
This album lands like a full sentence you’ve been drafting for months: loyal love, ordinary love, and the kind that tries to be both.
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