Joji

Osaka, Kobe and a YouTube channel he wanted buried

George Kusunoki Miller was born in Osaka on 16 September 1993 to a Japanese mother and an Australian father, and was schooled at the Canadian Academy in Kobe, graduating in 2012. He moved to the United States and took a BFA at the New York Institute of Technology in 2016, by which point he was already one of the better-known comedians on YouTube — though under a name that had nothing to do with music.

His first channel, 2cool4u92, went up in 2006. DizastaMusic followed in 2008 for sketch work, and in 2011 he launched the Filthy Frank character, pitched as an anti-vlogger: shock humour, deliberately ugly editing, no attempt to be likeable. The TVFilthyFrank channel accumulated 7.88 million subscribers, and one of its clips did more than any of the others by popularising the Harlem Shake format that carried Baauer's track up the charts. Miller also recorded comedy music as Pink Guy, releasing a self-titled album in 2014 and Pink Season in 2017.

On 29 December 2017 he announced he was finished with the comedy work, citing health and creative exhaustion. He has an undisclosed neurological condition that produces stress-induced seizures and has cost him performances since. The music he then began releasing as Joji — the Japanese reading of his first name — was the opposite of the character: slow, thin-voiced, almost deliberately unsellable.

Three albums that moved him out of the joke

Ballads 1 arrived in 2018 and reached number three on the Billboard 200. Its single "Slow Dancing in the Dark" became the thing people knew him for, and remains the song he has performed most often — 182 times by the count kept on setlist.fm. Nectar followed in 2020 and also peaked at number three.

Smithereens, in 2022, was the smaller and stranger record, but it carried the biggest single of his career. "Glimpse of Us", released on 10 June 2022, reached number eight on the US Hot 100, number twelve in the UK, number one in Australia and number two on the Billboard Global 200. It became the first song by an Asian artist to top Spotify's global chart, where it stayed for ten consecutive days, and only the second song by a Japanese artist to enter the Hot 100 top ten since 1963. It was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2022 ARIA Awards and has been certified double platinum in the United States.

Then he stopped. No album, no tour, almost nothing for three years.

A billboard, a label change and five singles

In October 2025 he posted a photograph of a video billboard captioned "see u soon". The single "Pixelated Kisses" landed on 14 October 2025, his first release since Smithereens. Around the same time his eight-year distribution and exclusivity arrangement with 88rising and Warner Records came to an end; the new material comes out through his own imprint, Palace Creek, distributed by Virgin Music Group.

Four more singles followed in quick succession: "If It Only Gets Better" on 4 November 2025, "Past Won't Leave My Bed" on 7 November, "Love You Less" on 2 January 2026 and "Last of a Dying Breed" on 23 January.

Piss in the Wind, and the man sent to talk about it

The album came on 6 February 2026, 45 minutes and 58 seconds long, assembled from sessions dating back to 2017 and running through 2023 to 2025 with sixteen credited producers, among them Dylan Brady, Ricky Reed and Kenneth Blume. Giveon, 4Batz, Yeat and Don Toliver appear on the standard edition; a deluxe version in June 2026 added The Kid LAROI, Anyma and Corbin. It debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 with 86,000 album-equivalent units, 45,000 of them pure sales, and reached number two in Scotland and number three in Australia.

Reviews split. The record holds a Metacritic average of 66. James Mellen's 8/10 in Clash called it less hit-filled than its predecessors but "potentially the most authentic Joji project to date", a scenic route through every corner of his sound. Pitchfork gave it 5.9, praising the production while arguing that several ideas arrive unfinished.

The promotional campaign was run, in part, by someone else. Model and actor Robert Birdsall appeared in Joji's place across interviews, press materials and music videos. On 29 December 2025 Birdsall fronted a Genius lyric-explainer video for "Pixelated Kisses", playing it straight throughout; fans settled on calling him "Joe G". It is the first album cycle in which Miller has essentially outsourced his own face, and it tells on the tour, where the comedy has largely been stripped out.

Where the tour has got to

The Solaris Tour was announced on 26 February 2026 — his fifth tour, 41 shows, arenas throughout. It opened on 16 June at the Prudential Center in Newark and ran across North America until 23 July in Denver. On 4 March a second Los Angeles night was added at the Intuit Dome on 12 July after the 11 July show sold through.

The European leg ran from 11 August in Dublin to 3 September in Milan, taking in London's O2 on 13 August along with Manchester, Cologne, Copenhagen, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Brussels, Berlin, Zurich and Paris. A single return to the Americas followed at Festival Vaivén outside Cuernavaca, Mexico, on 17 October — the most recent logged performance.

What remains is the Australasian and Asian run: Brisbane Entertainment Centre on 11 November, Sydney on 14 November, Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne on 17 November, Spark Arena in Auckland on 19 November, two nights in Singapore on 21 and 22 November, then Bangkok, Kaohsiung and a finish at AsiaWorld-Expo in Hong Kong on 29 November. Nate Sib and Corbin opened in North America; Tommy Richman has taken the support slot everywhere else.

The show

The staging is the most expensive thing he has ever put on the road and the most literal interpretation of the tour's name. Four stacked layers of LED frames are linked by a moving catwalk that lifts him as high as three storeys above the floor, tethered at the waist, so that he can hang over the crowd, sit on the lip of the platform with his feet over the edge, or drop back to stage level. The screen content leans on degraded analogue footage and faked security-camera feeds of cryptids and humanoid robots, cut with live close-ups of his own face.

Opening night in Newark ran to thirty entries on the printed setlist, five of which — "If It Only Gets Better", "Rain on Me", "Plastic Taste", "Reanimator" and "Demons" — played over the speakers during interludes while he was off stage, leaving roughly twenty-five sung live across five albums. The sequence starts with "Pixelated Kisses" into "Sojourn" under heavy red light, works through "Sanctuary", "Love You Less", "Glimpse of Us", "Daylight" and "Yeah Right", includes a mash-up of "Tarmac" with "Tick Tock", and ends on "Slow Dancing in the Dark".

Reviewers have been consistent on the singing — "exceptional", "full and confident" — and on the change in tone, which is markedly more earnest than previous tours. The Barclays Center show on 26 June sold out with Corbin on first and Nate Sib second; Joji was audibly fighting a cold and got through it, handed the chorus of "Afterthought" to the audience, and closed with a two-song encore. Not everything works as designed: in Newark both the T-shirt cannon and a small on-stage robot failed outright, though by Brooklyn the cannon was firing and a dancing robot made it out for a verse.