Sen Morimoto Time Is on Your Side, the fourth studio album from the Kyoto-born, Chicago-based artist, has been announced for release on 23 October via Sooper Records, with lead single ‘Overthinker’ already out in the world.
The record follows on from 2023’s Diagnosis and, more immediately, the 2024 companion-piece EP BONK!, according to Stereogum. It is a body of work that places Morimoto in a prolific run of releases: Cannonball! arrived in 2018, a self-titled record followed in 2021, then Diagnosis in 2023, and now this, the fourth full-length, as noted by Yardbarker. That is a serious catalogue to be getting on with.
Time as an ingredient, not an enemy
Morimoto has been unusually candid about the philosophy behind the album. In a press release, they said: ‘I’m not fighting time anymore. I treat it as an ingredient. Some of these songs only need a pinch, a couple of improvised takes. Others sat for years, like wine in a barrel, until they became equal parts of my past and future. My hope is that it could inspire the freedom to slow down.’
That framing goes some way to explaining the range of textures you’d expect from a Morimoto release. Genre-spanning is the shorthand, but it undersells the craft involved in making improvised looseness and years-long gestation coexist on the same record. The ‘Overthinker’ video, shot in woodland, nods at that tension between stillness and restlessness without spelling it out.
The nine-track LP runs as follows: ‘Leave It All Behind’, ‘Flashback’, ‘Overthinker’, ‘Chewing Gum’, ‘Lucky Strike’, ‘Moves Like a Drunk’, ‘The Devil’, ‘I Saw You’, and the title track ‘Time Is on Your Side’.
The Chicago collective behind the record
Morimoto is not operating in isolation. The album features a group of collaborators drawn from the same Chicago scene that has long surrounded the project: Kaina Castillo, Ryan Person, Elijah Bradford, and Brok Mende all appear on the LP. The tight-knit character of that circle is part of what gives Morimoto’s records their particular warmth, a sense that the music is being made by people who genuinely know each other rather than session players booked by the day.
That community feeling extends to the label side too. Sooper Records, which Morimoto co-owns and has operated since 2019, is handling the release, according to the Sen Morimoto official site. Running your own imprint gives you the kind of control over pace and rollout that most artists on bigger rosters simply do not have, and Morimoto has leaned into that: BONK! arrived last year as a companion piece, and Time Is on Your Side follows without any apparent rush to chase a trend or fill a commercial window.
The Kyoto-born, Chicago-based artist has built something genuinely independent over the course of four records, threading through jazz, soul, indie pop and experimental electronics without planting a flag in any one of them. The Sen Morimoto Time Is on Your Side announcement positions this as the most reflective entry in that catalogue yet, an album about patience rather than pace, even as the release schedule itself is anything but slow.
Time Is on Your Side is released on 23 October via Sooper Records.
