andata perfectly captures the essence of the style Sakamoto settled upon in his final decade. Taken from the album async, his first solo record after battling throat cancer in 2015, andata is the sound of Sakamoto grappling with his own mortality: the title means ‘gone’ in Italian, and he believed at the time of writing that it might be his final release. “That’s why I tried to forget all the rules and forms,” he told the New York Times in 2017. “I thought this could be my last one, so I thought I should do everything that I wanted to do.”