Mateus Asato

Campo Grande, then Hollywood

Asato was born in Campo Grande, in central Brazil, on 29 December 1994, the grandson of Okinawan emigrants. He started on guitar at ten and came up through the Brazilian scene quickly enough to win the national contest Double Vision against a field of around 500 entrants. In 2013 he moved to Los Angeles to study at Musicians Institute, and in 2014 the school handed him its Outstanding Guitar Player award.

The playing that made his name is a hybrid: fingers and pick together, wide jazz voicings, slides that arrive from nowhere. The foundations were laid at home by Brazilian players — Juninho Afram and Kiko Loureiro — and by the 1980s and 90s technicians, Eddie Van Halen, Joe Satriani and John Petrucci. The soul vocabulary came later and by accident. He told an interviewer published in April 2024 that he fell into neo-soul around 2015 while working with the R&B singer Tori Kelly, and went back to study D'Angelo and Lauryn Hill after the fact. His favourite record, he said in the same conversation, is John Mayer's Continuum.

The sideman years, and the disappearance

Industry people found him on Instagram, not through a demo, and the hiring followed: touring with Tori Kelly, touring with Jessie J, then Las Vegas dates with Bruno Mars, and work in the orbit of Silk Sonic. He ran guitar clinics in South Korea and Singapore. Guitar Magazine put him on its 2019 list of the fifty most exciting young guitarists in the world, and Suhr unveiled a signature model for him at the 2020 NAMM Show — the line now takes in a Classic S and a pair of Twins T instruments with differing pickups and headstocks.

The following passed a million on Instagram, and then in February 2021 he closed the account and stopped playing publicly altogether. He reopened it on 31 March 2022. He married the Brazilian actress and YouTuber Maju Trindade in 2024 and moved back to Brazil, which is where the record that had been sitting unfinished for most of a decade finally got made.

ASATO: a decade of files, finished at last

The debut album arrived on 27 February 2026, fifteen tracks, wholly instrumental, and titled simply with his surname. That was the point. The Japanese family name was something he had grown up hearing mangled and had spent his professional life attaching to other people's records; a trip to Japan in 2017 turned it into the thing he wanted on the sleeve. Several of the pieces take their cues from that journey — Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hokkaido and the family's Okinawa all sit somewhere under the music.

The material spans an unusually long stretch. The oldest composition, Change, dates to 2014; the last studio recordings were made in December 2024. The running order takes in MA, Otsukare!, Rush, Wasted Hit, Mellow, Cryin', The Breakup Song, Time, North, Change, Kyoto's Jam, Kawaii, Goodbye., HENDRIX and a closer called too nerdy for pop, too pop for nerds. Cryin' had gone out first as his debut single. HENDRIX announced the album in January 2026 and came, by his account, from a late-night thought in the studio: if Hendrix were alive today and the two of them were friends. Kawaii got the video.

Asato has been deliberately unhelpful about what any of it means. Sometimes the point of a message is its own subjectivity, he said of the record — like an abstract painting with no description. The argument he is making with fifteen wordless tracks is that instrumental guitar music does not need a singer bolted on to finish the thought.

How it landed

Guitar World's verdict on the album was that all fifteen cuts earn their place and none outstay their welcome, and that Asato is a genuine original at a time when originals are scarce — no gimmick, nothing outrageous, an understated approach subtle enough that it can pass a listener by on first hearing, from a player the magazine reckons is on his way to being one of the best of his generation. That is roughly the consensus among guitarists, and it has been for years; what changed in 2026 is that there is now a body of his own work to attach it to rather than a feed of clips.

The commercial evidence is in the ticketing. Paris and Madrid sold out ahead of the October run, the São Paulo date at Teatro Bradesco on 10 September was close to sold out with tickets from R$110, and the Taipei show was moved to a bigger room and a new date.

ASATOUR: the routing

The 2026 world tour opened in Asia over the summer — Manila on 31 July, Bangkok, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo, Seoul on 13 August, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore on 20 August at Foo Chow Hall, Jakarta on 22 August — before Australian dates in Melbourne and Sydney, where he played The Factory Theatre on 25 August.

September was Brazil: Belo Horizonte, São Paulo on 10 September, Rio de Janeiro at Teatro Clara Nunes on 17 September, and Curitiba. Europe follows in October — Club Volta in Cologne on the 4th, O2 Academy2 Islington in London on the 6th, Gate in Milan on the 7th, Eindhoven on the 9th, Badaboum in Paris on the 10th, Nazca in Madrid on the 13th and Lisboa Ao Vivo on the 15th. Then mainland China from 21 to 25 October across Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing, Taipei on the 29th, a second Brazilian leg on 18, 19 and 21 November in Brasília, Goiânia and Recife, and a closing night at EX Theater Roppongi in Tokyo on 16 December. No support acts are listed for any of the European dates.

What the show is now

The rooms are small and mostly seated — theatres in Brazil, club-sized venues across Europe — which suits a set built on tone and dynamics rather than volume. The Rio show on 17 September ran to thirteen items: an instrumental intro, then Otsukare!, Rush and Cryin' from the album, a stretch through The Bridge, North, Goodbye., The Breakup Song and Kawaii, and a closer, Empty Hands. Two covers sat in the middle — Crowded House's Don't Dream It's Over and the Bee Gees' How Deep Is Your Love?, both rearranged as melody vehicles. Don't Dream It's Over is the most frequently logged song in his live history on setlist.fm.

The Sydney show in August drew on the same core — How Deep Is Your Love?, North, The Breakup Song, Kawaii — but added Hey Joe, which fits the Hendrix thread running through the record. The shape is consistent: album material as the spine, two or three familiar vocal songs played without a vocalist, and no pyrotechnics beyond what the hands are doing.