Photo by Saeka Shimada
Mei Semones has announced her second album, Howl, arriving January 15 through her new label home Verve/Interscope, alongside the record’s title track and a new North American headline tour.
Written after Semones spent July 4, 2025 alone in her Brooklyn apartment listening to neighborhood dogs howl back at the fireworks outside, “Howl” turns that sound into something closer to connection than loneliness. “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.”
The record follows 2025’s Animaru and continues Semones’ unlikely but increasingly natural collision of jazz, bossa nova, samba, math rock and bilingual English/Japanese songwriting. Howl was recorded at New York’s Power Station with Semones joined by Noah Leong, Claudius Agrippa, Noam Tanzer and Ransom McCafferty.
The video for “Howl,” directed by longtime collaborator Takuto Shimpo and filmed in Tokyo, casts Semones as a convenience-store worker by day and guitar-obsessed werewolf by night.
Semones will take the album across North America next spring, including a Dallas stop at Texas Theatre on April 15.
Howl arrives January 15. “Howl” is out now.
