Electronic Press Kit
HARACHAN
A Norwegian guy making Japanese city pop in Japanese, from a tiny studio in Oslo — and now, Tokyo.
PREVIOUS RELEASES
Monthly listeners
With only four tracks Paradise is a synth-soaked viral debut from another time — classic city pop grooves with the kind of forward momentum you only get when someone falls genuinely in love with a genre and decides to live inside it. Harachans music encapsulates that positive, lighthearted vibe that makes 80s music still relevant and popular today.
VIRAL
MUSIC
VIDEOS
Educated as a director in his time in Berlin, all music videos are written, directed, and produced by Harachan — no label, no production company. Just a Norwegian guy with a camera and a very specific aesthetic vision.
The virval video was shot with the 62 year old dancer-influencer Tohru and his dance crew on a shoe-string budget, and made with a total crew of four people.
GOING
TO
JAPAN
Above are ungraded stills from the new music video, and single “Going to Japan”. An ironic twist on the familiar fantasy: the idea that everything will be better once you get to Japan. Shot as an 80s green screen TV ad featuring a cast of Japans biggest foreign influencers with huge audiences spanning all social media platforms.
The song is a vibrant, poppy and filled with humor and charm. The chorus of “Im going to Japan, I dont care where I land” is catchy as hell, and the blend of synth and smooth. guitar riffs puts it in that sweet spot of being simple and accessible, while still being complex and groovy. The track fits with all playlists of Yacht Rock, City Pop, summer beach vibes, driving playlists, and of course, anything related to Japan.
Japan-focused creators appearing in the new music video, with a combined audience of 8.4 million followers.
The music video aims to capture the irony in the Japanese lyrics, and translate it to a western audience so they can also be “in on the joke”. With translated Japanese lines like “The courtain rises on my popular phase” the song makes fun of the experience every foreigner has when going to Japan for longer than a vacation, while still being funny and relateable enough for those who see it and are just traveling there.
To maximise the potential for the music video, short form videos will be released specifically for each of the influencers involved so it can be co-posted with my own social media accounts, effectively adding their reach to mine.
The video also contains a silly tik tok dance about going to see places in Japan, in order to maximise the potential virality of it. Traveling to Japan is one of the most popular things to post on social media right now, and thats what we capitalise on.
OSLO
TO
TOKYO
Harachan is the artist name of Harald Furuholmen — Norwegian writer, director, and musician, currently based in Tokyo. The name was handed to him on his first trip to Japan by a group of drunk salarymen who couldn't get their tongues around "Harald Furuholmen." It stuck.
Self-taught in Japanese, Harald makes city pop that sounds like it was pressed to wax in 1983. Warm, synth-soaked grooves with Japanese lyrics built for late nights, summer beaches and karaoke adventures.
His debut EP Paradise, produced with Oslo-based producer Magnus Bechmann Hansen, suddenly blew up, through a viral music video, hitting 383K views on youtube at present, and racking up nearly 200,000 streams in the past 90 days. With an audience that keeps growing harachan is on his way to become a household name in the city pop, j-pop and yacht rock scene.
UPCOMING
The coming year is filled with releases, new music videos, concerts and collabs, with artists like WIM (Thailand) in the works.
Help me make this banger a hit! To stay updated check my info underneath.
haraldfuruholmen.com
