The bells have barely jingled. KFC orders ain’t even out the door. Presents are still being wrapped chile. And Teruzane said ‘Drop the new song announcement’.

As many fans had expected once Hikaru Utada’s greatest hits album and tour Science Fiction was announced, there are going to be new songs on this thing. “Gold ~Au” is one of them and it will be joined by another, “Hero”.

Could you imagine if it was a cover of the Enrique Ingelsias song?

It isn’t. But imagine.

Because Teruzane always makes sure that Hikaru is gettin’ to that money, this single has a tie in with a J-drama.

“Hero” will feature as the theme song for the Fuji TV drama Kimi ga Kokoro wo Kureta Kara, which translates as The Gift of Your Heart. The show debuts on January 8th, 2024, which means we’ll be hearing the song in little over a week of me posting this. Even sooner in fact. Because we’ll either get a trailer drop or a segment which airs on national TV about the show which features a snippet of the song.

There’s no word on whether the song will receive a music video, but we can hope. And given how busy Hikaru Utada has been lately and that they bothered to shoot a cute lil’ video just for the commercial for “Gold” and the Science Fiction announcement, it’s highly likely something was shot, or plans to be shot. Hikaru isn’t precious about music videos dropping the same day as the songs, which I quite like and it seems to be a pretty regular thing in J-pop these days with digital singles.

I still cannot believe how steady and consistent Hikaru Utada’s releases have been since they came back with Fantôme in 2016. Back then, I really thought they would drop that album and then just disappear; only appearing to release a new song when a new Kingdom Hearts game of Evangelion movie was gonna drop. But they have been the most active they’ve been since the Toshiba-EMI days. I have no expectation that Hikaru will keep releasing music. I treat every release like it could be their last, because Hikaru done showed us that they are ready to walk away from all this shit at any moment it don’t feel right for them. So I just try to enjoy what they give, when they give it and be thankful that they bothered.