Justin Nozuka

Queens by birth, Bloor West by upbringing

Justin Tokimitsu Nozuka was born on 29 September 1988 in Queens, New York, to a Canadian mother, Holly Sedgwick, and a Japanese father, Hiromitsu Nozuka. He was raised in Bloor West Village in Toronto, one of seven children brought up by his mother on her own. The household was musical and competitive with it: his brother George became a recording artist, his brother Philip an actor, and the family tree reaches into American film through his mother's half-sister, the actress Kyra Sedgwick.

He started writing at twelve. By fifteen he had finished songs that would survive onto record, among them "Supposed to Grow Old" and "I'm in Peace". A songwriting workshop put him in front of the Canadian artist Damhnait Doyle, who introduced him to the Universal Records scout Allan Reid. Three demo tracks cut with the producer Bill Bell were enough to earn a contract offer, and he turned it down, choosing to make the record independently and keep control of it. That instinct — take the smaller, slower, self-owned version of the deal — has shaped most of the two decades since.

Holly, and the long decade after it

The debut album was named after his mother. Holly came out in the United Kingdom on 19 March 2007, in Canada that April, and in the United States in April 2008, issued through Outcaste and Glassnote and produced by Bill Bell. It ran 49 minutes and leaned on acoustic guitar, cello and hand percussion behind a voice that kept getting described as older than its owner. AllMusic's Jo-Ann Greene called it "a stunning debut, whose lyrics and atmospheres linger on long after the last track has played". Commercially it was a grower rather than an explosion: number six on the US Top Heatseekers chart, number 30 on Independent Albums, number 23 in France and number 79 in the Netherlands. He backed it with an 18-city Canadian tour, a first US headline run, and television slots on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and Good Morning America.

France took to him hardest, and a 2010 duet with Zaho, "Heartless", cemented it; he has described shuttling between Paris and the United States through that period. The albums that followed arrived at a pace set by nobody but him. You I Wind Land and Sea appeared in April 2010 and reached number 118 on the Billboard 200. A four-year gap produced Ulysees in April 2014, which he produced himself. Run to Waters followed in May 2018. Each one moved a little further from the campfire-confessional template of the debut and a little closer to something built in a room with a laptop in it.

The R&B turn

Daydreams & Endless Nights, released in June 2023, is the record that redrew the map. Nozuka wrote and assembled it in Toronto around his brother Henri and a small circle of friends, and described the method to the French magazine Modzik in September 2023 as deliberately unplanned: "I threw paint on the canvas and let the project tell me what it wanted to be." The result is a straight R&B album — lo-fi textures on tracks like "Lay Down", an unaccompanied guitar on "Given", and in "444" a song he wrote to catch "that feeling of being in love, where everything feels so easy". It is billed as his fifth studio album and, in the promoter copy that now follows him around, as the pivot from acoustic folk roots to alternative R&B.

Chlorine came in September 2024 and went further in the other direction: twelve tracks in roughly 22 minutes, filed under alt-pop, closer to a sketchbook than a statement. Professional reviews barely materialised — the Album of the Year database still carries no critic scores for it, only a user average of 76 from a handful of ratings — which says less about the record than about where Nozuka now sits in the attention economy. The Dutch site Maxazine, assessing the title track, admired the writing enough to wonder aloud what a heavier soul singer would do with it.

Through 2025 he stopped making albums altogether and started making deliveries. Three lo-fi EPs titled with Japanese numerals — 一, 二, 三 — arrived alongside standalone singles: "Somewhere over the Rainbow" with his brother George, "Moonlight Radiator" featuring Elijah Fox, and a live cut of "Right By You" recorded for Mahogany. The collaborator list across recent years takes in Mahalia, RZA and India.Arie.

Where things stand, October 2026

The most recent release is a single, "Vanish", put out on 21 August 2026, preceded earlier in the year by "On Your Time (Hold You Like It's Ice Cold)". There is no sixth album announced.

What there is instead is a touring year of unusual shape. Across early 2026 Nozuka ran a series of explicitly unplugged shows through Canada and the United States, in rooms chosen for their size rather than their capacity to recoup. The 28 February 2026 date at Epiphany Center for the Arts in Chicago sold out: two completely unplugged acoustic sets in the venue's Sanctuary, doors at 7pm, on stage 7.30 to 9.30, £-equivalent ticketing at $60 before fees, 17 and over. On 8 May he played the Gallery at Artech in Vancouver — 45 seats, limited standing, light refreshments, a room licensed for low-amplification shows. A Phoenix attendee in May reported "simply Justin Nozuka and his guitar", and that he stayed afterwards to talk to everyone present.

The autumn leg is a 21-city North American run billed as fan favourites plus unreleased material first aired over the summer. Dated stops include Worcester, Massachusetts on 4 October, Washington DC's Pearl Street Warehouse on 6 October (sold out, all ages, doors 7pm), Salt Lake City on 15 October, Barboza in Seattle on 18 October, The Pearl in Vancouver on 19 October, Portland on 20 October, The Chapel in San Francisco on 22 October, Teragram Ballroom in Los Angeles on 23 October, The Rebel Lounge in Phoenix on 25 October, Dallas on 27 October, Austin on 28 October, The Masquerade's Altar room in Atlanta on 30 October, Nashville on 31 October, Columbus on 2 November and the Opera House in Toronto on 6 November, with two Miami nights on 1 and 2 December. Europe follows in early 2027: Yuca in Cologne on 24 February, the Alhambra in Paris on 26 February and The Lower Third in London on 3 March.

What the show is

The staging is close to nothing. A reviewer at the O2 Institute in Birmingham on the late-2024 European run counted mic stands, guitars, a loop pedal and a single chair, and watched Nozuka shift mid-set into a fully acoustic passage. Archie Marks, writing for Redbrick, singled out the vocal crescendos in "Orange Lampshade" and "Break Me" and the loop-pedal construction on "Dwell", and concluded that "his presence and talent was enough, and he knew that". The crowd in that room was small, older than the average club audience, and extremely long-serving — one couple had travelled from Bristol after waiting seventeen years for the chance.

The 2026 shows have kept that logic and dropped the amplification. Reviewing the Worcester date on 4 October 2026, the writer Shardai described a room weighted heavily towards women responding to songs about tender, unhurried love, with the Boston singer Miranda Rae opening and returning later for a duet that she rated the emotional high point of the night. The pattern across the autumn is support acts drawn locally rather than a fixed opener carried from city to city.