After two years away from music, Jaguar Jonze is properly back. The Taiwanese-Australian artist has announced her new album arriving in January 2027, alongside the brilliantly titled new single “Kawasaki Ninja”. It follows “Naked” and “Half Devil” in introducing this next chapter, and there’s a sense that Jonze is having fun with music again after several years in which her work carried some understandably heavy emotional weight.
“Kawasaki Ninja” feels like that freedom being pushed into overdrive, as it’s loud, restless and knowingly rebellious, with Jaguar singing from the perspective of someone who has spent enough time being told to quieten down. Rather than getting bogged down in the people or systems trying to stop her, she turns resistance into fuel. The repeated language around being loud, powerful and leaving people “in the dust” gives the song an almost cartoonish sense of momentum – less interested in carefully explaining itself than enjoying the feeling of finally being able to hit the accelerator.
“Being on set for the music video was the first time I got back on a motorcycle after years of neurophysio rehab,” Jaguar says about the production of the video. “I’m passionate, and sentimental and knew that I would have the courage and strength to trust my body and do it if it was for my art. I was so scared but it felt so special to get back up on that horse (power haha) for this song that I had written about motorcycles, about freedom, about self empowerment in a time that was difficult to have faith in myself.”
There’s a much bigger story sitting behind that rush, as Jaguar stepped away from music following serious health issues, and BEASTMASTER emerged from the process of figuring out who she was when some of her old certainties disappeared; her documented return follows a period in which she also took up freediving as part of her recovery. But “Kawasaki Ninja” doesn’t sound like someone cautiously rebuilding the person they used to be. It sounds like someone discovering they don’t actually have to. That seems to be the really exciting idea behind BEASTMASTER: not defeating every difficult part of yourself, but making enough room for all of it – the angry bits, playful bits, frightened bits and ridiculously confident bits — and seeing what happens when they’re finally allowed to make some noise together.
