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Hikaru Utada's New Fantôme Album Debuts at #6 on U.S. iTunes Chart

Singer Hikaru Utada's new Fantôme album is ranked at #6 on the U.S. iTunes album chart as of press time on Thursday. The album is also ranked at #12 on the French iTunes album chart as of Thursday. The album, which Universal Music released on Wednesday, is Utada's first full album in eight years.

Utada's This Is the One album ranked at #69 on the U.S. Billboard in 2009, making her one of the few Japanese artists to chart on the U.S. Billboard's Top 100, and the first one to do so over two decades.

The Fantôme album includes the tracks "Sakura Nagashi" (the Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo theme song), "Hanataba Wo Kimini" (the theme song for the Toto Nee-Chan: Fatherly Sister drama) and "Manatsu no Tooriame" (the theme song for NTV's NEWS ZERO program). The rest of the album features new tracks.

Utada released her Heart Station album in March 2008.

Utada announced in July 2015 that she was working on a new album overseas while pregnant with her son, who was born in summer 2015. She had married Francesco Calliano, an Italian bartender, in 2014 and dealt with the death of her mother the year before.

Utada has performed theme songs for all three films so far in the new four-part Evangelion film project, as well as the live-action Casshern film, the Hana Yori Dango 2 [Returns] live-action television series, the Freedom video anime series, and the Kingdom Hearts video game series. In addition to her singing career, she played the heroine Pinoko in the 2001-2002 Black Jack net anime series.

[Via Hachima Kikō]