There’s a specific kind of tired that comes from a week where the group project, the part-time shift, three unanswered chats, and a friend’s birthday dinner all land on the same Thursday. Belgian-Japanese electro-pop duo Aili & Orson have turned that feeling into Achi Kochi, a single released on 11 September 2026 through Eskimo Recordings.
For readers in Singapore, the plain version is this: there is no local show. Both live dates on the calendar are in Europe, and the song and video are linked on Spotify and YouTube.
What you can do from Singapore
- 🎧 Stream it: Achi Kochi on Spotify
- 📺 Watch it: the official music video on the duo’s YouTube channel
- 🎤 See it live: Europe only, on 22 October 2026 in Amsterdam and 10 March 2027 in Brussels (details at the end)
- 💿 What’s next: a second album planned for early 2027
- 📱 Keep up: follow Aili & Orson on Instagram for album news
The title roughly translates to “all over the place”. The announcement describes the track as being about the exhausting necessity of keeping multiple plates spinning, with family, friends, careers, hobbies, and obligations all demanding attention at once. It’s a week plenty of students and fresh grads here would recognise.
What makes it worth a listen is how it handles that stress: by setting it to disco drums and singing every word in Japanese.
A Carousel You Can Dance To
Achi Kochi runs on looping Japanese vocals and a motorik rhythm, the steady, metronomic pulse that keeps a track marching forward without ever letting up. On top of that sit energetic disco drums played by guest Lander Gyselinck and dreamy synth pads.
The looping is the clever part. A vocal phrase that keeps circling back sounds a lot like a to-do list that refills the moment something gets ticked off, and the drums push forward as if there’s a deadline attached. Yet the synths underneath are soft and a little sad, so the song lands somewhere between a panic and a hug. The announcement calls it “a sonic carousel of stimulations”, built to be “temporarily exorcised on the dancefloor”, and that’s a fair summary.
The official music video is up on the duo’s YouTube channel, and it’s the quickest way to find out whether the song’s push and pull works on you.
Why It’s All in Japanese
Aili & Orson usually mix languages, so going fully Japanese on Achi Kochi is a choice.
Aili has explained the pull of the language in her own words before. In an artist statement on the SoundCloud page for the duo’s earlier track Dansu, published on 11 November 2025, she said: “I left Tokyo for Belgium when I was 7 years old. In many ways my Japanese stayed at that level. When I sing in Japanese it puts me into this naive, almost childlike mindset that allows me to express what I feel right away. You don’t need to understand the words just the feeling that they convey.”
That last line is the whole case for the song. Anyone who has looped a track in a language they don’t speak knows the words are rarely what hooks them first, and here the tension between restless drums and wistful synths tells the story without a translation. A childlike directness suits the subject too, because being pulled in five directions is a feeling long before it’s a sentence.
From a Chance Meeting to KCRW
The duo are Aili Maruyama and Orson Wouters, who met by chance in 2019 and came up through the Belgian alternative club scene. Their songwriting is built on electronic beats, samples, and Aili’s Japanese vocals, and their own biography describes the approach as playful and spontaneous.
Their debut EP (extended play) Dansu arrived in 2021 and, according to the duo’s material, spent eight weeks at No. 1 on Belgium’s Radio 1 VOX list. That run led to a partnership with Tokyo creative label TOKA for a special Japanese edition, which gave them a foothold in Japan’s alternative music community.
Then came the first full-length album, Nandakke?, which the same material says went straight to No. 1 on US station KCRW’s Top 30 Album Chart and picked up daytime rotation on KEXP, BBC Radio 6 Music, and Nova France. Music site Luminous Dash describes the pair’s sound as surreal electropop mixed with house, acid house, and disco, and reports that KCRW gave the Nandakke? title track a place in its Best of 2024.
They’ve played to big rooms as well. In late 2024 they supported L’Impératrice on a European tour that stopped at L’Olympia in Paris, Melkweg in Amsterdam, and the Roundhouse in London, which is a serious run of venues for an act singing in Japanese.
Achi Kochi is the first single from a second album planned for early 2027, and it’s pitched as a more self-reflective turn after the neon-pop rush of Nandakke?.
New to the duo? Listen in this order
1. Achi Kochi, the new single
2. The Nandakke? title track, to hear how much brighter they started
Europe First, Streaming Everywhere
Both live dates on the calendar are in Europe, so catching the song on stage from Singapore means a flight. The first is a slot at Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE), and the second is billed as the headline release show at Ancienne Belgique (AB) in Brussels.
Amsterdam Dance Event (ADE)
🎤 What: A slot at the festival
🗓️ Date: Thursday, 22 October 2026
📍 Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Headline Release Show
🎤 What: The headline release show
🗓️ Date: 10 March 2027
📍 Location: Ancienne Belgique (AB), Brussels, Belgium
Until those shows come around, Achi Kochi is made for headphones on a packed MRT (Mass Rapid Transit) train home, when the day has been all over the place and a disco beat is the only thing holding it together. Watch the music video on YouTube, stream the single on Spotify, and follow Aili & Orson on Instagram for news on the second album.
Photos by Tina Lewis Herbots. Visuals courtesy of Aili & Orson.
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