Guitarist Mateus Asato has announced his debut album, Asato, which is due out on February 27, 2026. To herald the announcement, he has shared the first single from the album, “Hendrix.”

Of the track, Asato shares:

“Everything started after a late night thought I had in my studio while trying to make another song for my debut album: “If Hendrix were alive today and we were friends… around the same age… how would he write an instrumental song?!

After that, I had a song in 20 minutes. Everything simply just came out and I felt like a vessel receiving melodies from above. A unique experience.

But this thought only happened after reading two books of his biography. Being completely inspired by it — I had no choice but honor the greatest guitar hero in history in my opinion.

His passion & faith through music, his sense of feeling things. One of the things that captivated me the most about his books was the story that “he’d always use his broom while cleaning his house pretending it was a guitar when a solo was being played on the radio”. Jimi was an eternal dreamer. Jimi truly believed music had supernatural powers — and that’s why his legacy shall remain.

This song might not relate much to Hendrix’s music in technical structure, and that is not my intention here. This is just a title of gratitude to the one who changed my perspective of playing the guitar.”

For over a decade, Asato has been an influential voice in modern guitar, yet his debut album, represents a new beginning. He sees it as a “sonic reclamation of his name, his heritage, and his confidence to be his own frontman.”

He chose his name as the album’s title because for Asato, his surname was once a source of childhood friction and a marker of “otherness” that often replaced his identity in the eyes of peers. But the title stands as a proud affirmation of his Japanese ancestry. The seeds for the project were sown during a transformative 2017 trip to Japan, an experience that shifted Mateus’s perspective from being a sideman (Bruno Mars, Jessie J, Tori Kelly, Silk Sonic) to a solo artist.

The album spans ten years of creative evolution, from 2014 to December of 2024. The result is a “sonic travelogue” inspired by the landscapes of Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hokkaido and his ancestral home of Okinawa.