HALCALI

HALCALI are a hip hop duo from Meguro, Tokyo, made up of HALCA and YUCALI, who met at the same dance school as primary school pupils. They won a female rapper audition in 2002 and were signed to For Life under the full production of O.T.F, or Oshare Track Factory, the unit formed by RIP SLYME’s RYO-Z and DJ FUMIYA.

Their first public performance came before any record existed. On July 26th, 2002, RIP SLYME called them up from the crowd at a free Nippon Budokan show, and the pair performed what would become their debut single in front of 10,000 people.

That single, ‘Tandem’, arrived on January 8th, 2003 and reached number 19 on the Oricon chart, with music channel play across WOWOW, SPACE SHOWER TV, MTV, and M-ON! pushing it well beyond the usual reach of a new act. ‘Electric Sensei’ followed on April 9th, 2003 and went two places higher, and ‘Giri Giri Surfrider’ took them into the top 10 that July. Debut album ‘Halcali Bacon’ landed in September 2003, drawing on O.T.F alongside a wider set of producers, and became an unusually large hit for a new hip hop act.

Albums ‘Ongaku no Susume’ (2004), ‘Cyborg Oretachi’ (2007), ‘TOKYO GROOVE’ (2010), and ‘TOKYO CONNECTION’ (2011) followed, with the duo touring in the United States and Europe as their audience spread outside Japan. Double album ‘Halcali no Okawari’ arrived in May 2012, pairing early singles with three new recordings, after which HALCALI stopped working as a unit.

Their catalogue found a second audience more than a decade later. ‘Otsukare SUMMER’, an album track from ‘Halcali Bacon’ produced by Fantastic Plastic Machine’s Tomoyuki Tanaka, began trending on TikTok in 2025 across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Southeast Asia. TikTok named it Japan’s number-one Song of the Summer for 2026, reporting that videos using it that year had passed 10 billion views by August. HALCA and YUCALI reunited on THE FIRST TAKE in May 2026 and returned to the stage at SUMMER SONIC 2026, then released ‘Guin Guin Guin’ on September 2nd, 2026, their first original song in around 14 years and their first work with O.T.F in the same span.