This story originally appeared in Rolling Stone Japan.
Ask BE:FIRST when the world started to feel within reach, and SOTA doesn’t mention Los Angeles.
He doesn’t point to Head in the Clouds, where the Japanese group recently performed for a crowd thousands
of miles from home on the sun-soaked grounds of the Rose Bowl. He doesn’t mention their first world tour, either, and the surreal realization that people in cities far beyond Japan already knew their names, their songs, and the words to sing back to them. Nor does he point to the moment they walked into studios in L.A. to make music alongside the American producers and songwriters whose work had long been part of their own musical vocabulary.
Instead, SOTA goes back roughly three years, before much of that was actually happening for the group.
It’s a reflective answer from someone who, just days earlier, looked entirely focused on the present. When we speak over video, SOTA is sitting with the other five members of BE:FIRST around a conference table in Tokyo, drinks scattered between them, still only a few days removed from their performance at Summer Sonic, one of Japan’s biggest music festivals. They trade glances across the table and crack jokes that don’t always need explaining; the years together have apparently given them their own shorthand and inside humor.
At Summer Sonic, that familiarity took a much louder form. Inside the vast ZOZO Marine Stadium, BE:FIRST opened with “BRUCE WAYNE,” the bass-heavy first taste of their global EP, WATCH ME. Across a high-energy midday set that spanned their chart-topping singles and fan favorites, the six moved across the stage with the confidence of a group accustomed to one another’s rhythms, while fans in the crowd danced along in the stands. It was a fitting snapshot of BE:FIRST right now: at home in Japan, opening their set with a song made in Los Angeles, already testing how easily the distance between those two places might collapse.
But when SOTA thinks about when that distance first began to shrink, he goes back to the music. Around the time BE:FIRST was making 2023’s “Mainstream,” the members began taking greater ownership of the creative process. As their involvement deepened, so did the questions they asked themselves. If the world was where they ultimately wanted to go, what exactly did they want to bring with them?
“What kind of music do we want to make as BE:FIRST for a global audience?” SOTA remembers asking. Then came another question, one that has arguably become even more important as that global ambition has turned into reality: “When you look at us from a global perspective, what is the musical identity that only BE:FIRST can have?”
Five years into their career, BE:FIRST is still answering it. WATCH ME arrives at a pivotal moment for the six-member group. The world that once existed largely on the other side of a screen has become tangible: overseas stages and unfamiliar crowds, passport stamps and writing camps, rooms in Los Angeles where members split off between three studios to build songs with new collaborators at a pace that surprised even them. The EP brings BE:FIRST together with ATL Jacob, Tommy Brown, BIA, Flo Milli, and others, placing the group more directly than ever in conversation with the hip-hop and R&B its members grew up admiring.
The ambition was embedded in BE:FIRST from the beginning. The group was born in 2021 out of THE FIRST, an audition project launched by Japanese rapper and producer SKY-HI through his newly established management company, BMSG. From the start, SKY-HI wasn’t simply looking for polished idols. He wanted artists who could sing, dance, and eventually help create their own music — a group that could emerge from Japan with its sights already set beyond it.
“The world was in our minds from our first year,” SHUNTO says. But for a long time, global remained more a destination than a reality. “It’s really only been in the past few years that we’ve seriously started putting that into action.”
What emerged was a lineup whose individual paths to BE:FIRST looked strikingly different. SOTA arrived as an already accomplished dancer and choreographer, having competed internationally long before he ever stood onstage as a member of a boy group. SHUNTO brought a distinctive, huskier vocal tone; MANATO had spent years training in singing and dance and would eventually become one of the members most deeply involved in songwriting. JUNON entered the audition as something of an outlier; he had the striking presence of a natural idol, but little formal dance training compared with some of the others. LEO’s natural warmth and expressiveness would make him an emotional anchor within the group. And RYUHEI, the talented youngest, was just 14 when BE:FIRST debuted, meaning much of his adolescence, and his evolution as an artist, has unfolded alongside the group’s own.
They weren’t necessarily the people you would put together if you were working backward from a conventional blueprint for a boy band. That, increasingly, has become the point. “When we started, I think even we had a somewhat stereotypical idea of what a boy band was supposed to be,” SOTA says.
That definition has since stretched considerably. BE:FIRST debuted in November 2021 with “Gifted,” but the group’s identity wasn’t something that arrived fully formed with its name. Over the next several years, its members gradually moved from performers interpreting someone else’s vision to active participants in shaping their own.
That evolution is important to SOTA’s memory of “Mainstream.” Debuting at Number One on the Japan Hot 100, the hip-hop-driven single represented more than another step in BE:FIRST’s ascent in Japan. Behind the scenes, it coincided with the members becoming more assertive about the music they wanted to make and the kind of group they wanted to become. The more creative control they gained, the more expansive their definition of a boy band became.
By then, BE:FIRST was well on its way to becoming one of Japan’s biggest boy groups. In five years, they’ve amassed 12 Number One singles, including their latest single, “Missing,” and this year sold out their first stadium shows, drawing roughly 100,000 people across two nights. Their presence extends beyond charts and stadiums, too. Spend enough time moving through Tokyo, and their faces have a way of finding you, like flickering across the screens mounted behind taxi headrests.
Their ambitions abroad, then, aren’t driven by needing to find an audience somewhere else. BE:FIRST already has one at home. The question is how much further it can travel without losing what made that audience care in the first place. “I think everything we’ve done in Japan up to this point has also been part of preparing ourselves to go overseas,” JUNON says.
And what they’ve built in Japan isn’t just a catalog of hits. It’s a way of working and a sense of freedom within the group that the members increasingly see as fundamental to their success.
“We’ve been able to do what we genuinely want to do,” SOTA says. “We’ve built a career that gives us the confidence to say that we’re enjoying ourselves more than anyone.” For him, that freedom has become part of the group’s identity. “I think that’s become a kind of boy-band culture that BE:FIRST has created for itself.”
Now, they’re finding out what happens when that identity leaves home. Around January, the members began gathering songs for WATCH ME, their first global EP. The material came from different creative processes: tracks MANATO co-wrote in Los Angeles with SKY-HI, alongside songs the other members developed through co-writing sessions in Japan.
“We gathered all of those songs and had conversations about what we should be putting out right now,” LEO says. The question wasn’t simply which songs were strongest, but which ones made sense for BE:FIRST at this particular moment. And some of the most revealing answers came out of a writing camp in Los Angeles.
Inside the L.A. studio, there was little time for preciousness. Three rooms were running at once, with the members splitting up and cycling through different combinations of producers and songwriters, each room operating according to its own creative logic.
For MANATO, who had already participated in co-writing sessions in Japan, the first surprise was the speed. Back home, he was accustomed to a more sequential process: build the track, freestyle melodies over it, write the lyrics, sometimes returning on another day to keep working. In L.A., that process became much more fluid. A producer could be constructing a beat while someone beside them was already reaching for lyrics, as another person shaped the melody in real time. Songs seemed to assemble themselves from several directions at once.
Then MANATO would walk into another room and find an entirely different rhythm. Some collaborators wanted to talk first, establishing a concept and lyrical world before anyone touched the melody. Others worked almost entirely from instinct and whatever energy had formed in the room. MANATO remembers one person sitting quietly for roughly 30 minutes, seemingly absorbed in their own thoughts, then suddenly emerging with nearly a complete idea. Another session was considerably less introspective. The atmosphere there, he recalls with a laugh, was closer to everyone raising a glass and saying, “Cheers!” while they made the song.
“What really stood out to me was the speed of the process,” MANATO recalls. But speed didn’t mean BE:FIRST stopped paying attention to what was being said. As English lyrics and concepts began flying around the rooms, there were moments when an idea that sounded perfectly natural within American hip-hop felt decidedly unnatural coming out of BE:FIRST’s mouths. References to money came up. So did relationships with women. The members would stop and consider not simply whether a line sounded good, but whether it sounded true.
“This lyric doesn’t really fit who we are right now, so let’s take it out,” MANATO remembers them saying. It was a small decision, but it gets at the larger experiment behind WATCH ME. BE:FIRST didn’t go to Los Angeles simply to borrow the sound of American hip-hop. They had to figure out what happened when that sound passed through them: what felt natural, what didn’t, and what needed to change in order to become theirs.
Sometimes, that meant pushing further outside the boundaries they’d already established. “BRUCE WAYNE” is perhaps the clearest example. Dark and bass-heavy, the song carries the fingerprints of ATL Jacob’s Atlanta roots while filtering them through BE:FIRST’s own sensibilities. And ATL Jacob had done his homework. Before the Atlanta producer began building what would become “BRUCE WAYNE,” he had watched videos of BE:FIRST performing. When the members met him in Los Angeles, MANATO remembers Jacob telling them, simply, “You guys are really cool.” The admiration went both ways. SOTA had been listening to Jacob’s music long before BE:FIRST ever stepped into a studio with him, and suddenly finding himself making a song alongside the producer was the kind of full-circle moment that reminded him “why you became an artist in the first place.”
For RYUHEI, making “BRUCE WAYNE” also gave the group a chance to step outside another major influence on its development: J-pop. “BE:FIRST has been heavily influenced by J-pop and has always had a lot of respect for it,” he says. “But this was also a chance for us to step away from that for a moment and reconsider things from a different perspective.”
That made choosing “BRUCE WAYNE” as the first taste of WATCH ME particularly consequential. The group knew that for many listeners outside Japan, this wouldn’t simply be a new single. It could be their introduction to the group. “There are still so many people overseas who have never heard us before. The way they encounter our music for the first time is really important,” RYUHEI says. “That first impression matters a lot.”
SOTA saw the choice somewhat differently. Before worrying about what a Western audience might want from BE:FIRST, he says, the group had to start with what BE:FIRST wanted from itself. “Wherever we are, we make the music we genuinely want to make and express what we genuinely want to express,” he says.
For BE:FIRST, “BRUCE WAYNE” passed that test. Hip-hop and R&B aren’t sounds the group suddenly adopted for its American debut; they’re part of the musical foundation its members grew up with, shaped in part by artists like Michael Jackson, Kendrick Lamar, and Justin Bieber.
To RYUHEI, those influences don’t make BE:FIRST any less distinctly Japanese. If anything, he sees that kind of musical exchange as fundamental to J-pop itself. “It’s really difficult to describe what makes J-pop special, but personally, I think one of its strengths is just how broad the musical range is,” he says. The group’s music, he points out, already moves between genres.
Japan, too, has a long history of looking outward. “We’ve also spent a long time importing music from overseas, in a positive sense, and absorbing those influences,” RYUHEI says. “I feel like that’s part of what makes J-pop interesting.”
This summer, that exchange came full-circle in an especially memorable way when the group joined Janet Jackson for a remix of “Doesn’t Really Matter,” her 2000 hit, after the pop and R&B icon played four dates across Japan. The collaboration reached No. 12 on the Japan Hot 100 in June.
What changed in Los Angeles was the opportunity to engage with those influences more directly and then decide what they sounded like filtered through BE:FIRST. Before figuring out how to make themselves legible to the world, in other words, they chose to make something they recognized as themselves.
There is, of course, a familiar playbook for crossing over: make the songs more immediately legible, sing more in English, sand away whatever might require explanation. BE:FIRST isn’t particularly interested in following it. “Going overseas doesn’t mean suddenly changing everything into English,” JUNON says. “We want to be able to present ourselves as J-pop while keeping the qualities we’ve developed up to this point.”
That wasn’t just a decision among the six members. It was a philosophy shared by the team around them, including their producer SKY-HI. “[He] felt the same way we did,” LEO says. “His feeling was, ‘We’re J-pop, so Japanese is important too.'”
It’s a distinction the members return to again and again. They aren’t opposed to change; WATCH ME itself shows how eager they are to experiment. What they’re wary of is changing simply to make themselves easier to export.
That confidence runs through WATCH ME. The title alone feels almost confrontational: two words delivered less like a request than a command. Look at us. Pay attention. BE:FIRST knows the odds aren’t necessarily in its favor. LEO readily acknowledges how difficult it can be for a J-pop group to establish itself in America. But that awareness didn’t make the members want to soften the statement.
“We have a lot of confidence in what we’ve built and what we’ve done up until now,” LEO says. “So in that sense, the phrase really does express how we feel: ‘We want you to watch us.'”
Confidence, though, isn’t the only emotion running through WATCH ME. For all the swagger of its title track and “DEAD EYES EVERYWHERE,” the EP also makes room for something more exposed. “PAPER SCARS,” which MANATO helped write, pulls in the opposite direction, revealing vulnerability alongside the bravado.
To SOTA, those impulses aren’t contradictory. They’re both embedded in the hip-hop and R&B traditions that have shaped BE:FIRST’s musical vocabulary from the beginning. The more interesting question, he says, is what six Japanese artists of their generation can add to those traditions themselves. “We’re always thinking about what BE:FIRST should be singing in Japanese,” SOTA says, “and what we, as people of our generation who grew up with these cultural influences, can bring to the sound.”
If asking the world to watch closely sounds like an invitation for pressure, RYUHEI doesn’t quite see it that way. “More curious,” he says, when asked how growing expectations have affected the group. The distinction feels revealing. At 19, RYUHEI is the youngest member of BE:FIRST, and much of his adolescence has unfolded alongside the group’s ascent. Yet when he talks about the scrutiny that might accompany its next chapter, he doesn’t describe anxiety so much as possibility. “It feels like we’re constantly discovering more and more of what we’re capable of,” he says. “And we’re also the ones creating those possibilities ourselves.”
That doesn’t mean BE:FIRST believes it has arrived at some final answer. In fact, RYUHEI describes almost the opposite. Creatively, the members are still asking themselves the same kinds of questions SOTA remembers them beginning to ask years ago: What do we need right now? What should BE:FIRST sound like now? What might it become next? “We’re still searching and figuring things out,” RYUHEI says.
RYUHEI won’t have to wonder for long. Beginning in September, the “WATCH ME” world showcase will take the group from Bangkok to Taipei and Manila, then end with two nights in New York. Four cities, three countries, and thousands of miles will give the group another chance to discover what RYUHEI seems most interested in finding out: what else BE:FIRST might be capable of.
For all this talk of searching, they don’t seem to spend much time fighting over the answer. Six artists increasingly involved in their own music would seem like a recipe for creative friction. Ask SOTA how they settle disagreements — a vote, perhaps, or whoever argues loudest — and he laughs at the premise. “We honestly don’t clash very often,” he says.
Instead, he describes a kind of ongoing negotiation. An idea might be good but wrong for this particular moment. Maybe, someone will suggest, it would make more sense next summer. The goal isn’t for every member to want the same thing; it’s to make enough room for all six to keep making the music they want to make. “The six of us have always tried to make sure that everyone can continue expressing the music they want to make,” SOTA says.
That might be as useful a definition of BE:FIRST as any they’ve come up with. From the beginning, they were built around the idea of going somewhere Japanese boy groups hadn’t necessarily gone before. But five years later, being “first” seems to mean something more complicated than reaching a particular chart position, market, or stage before anyone else does. It’s about refusing to inherit someone else’s definition of what a boy group should look or sound like.
That’s the genreless version of BE:FIRST they describe now: six artists with different instincts and ambitions, given enough room to bring those differences into the group rather than sanding them away. Their individual tastes can pull the music in different directions; their roles can expand as they do. The goal isn’t for six people to think exactly alike. It’s to build something elastic enough to contain all six of them.
Maybe that’s why SOTA says they’ve reached a place they couldn’t have imagined at debut. “It’s a really good place to be,” he smiles. They started with what he calls a “stereotypical” idea of a boy band. Now, he believes they’re becoming “a group without much precedent.”
For a group called BE:FIRST, there may be no more fitting place to end up.
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Styling by YUJI YASUMOTO. Hair by YUKI OSHIRO. Make-up by AYAKO CHIBA, NATSUHO MAKINO (from hiji), and NATSUKI MORIZANE.
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