Taka Perry

Taka Perry is the kind of producer you hear before you know his name. Australian–Japanese, raised in Canberra, he grew up juggling guitar, piano and bass, then disappeared into a DAW his parents bought him at 12 and never really came back out. By 17 he’d moved to Sydney, plugged into APRA’s SongMakers program and found a mentor in Robert Conley, quietly building a portfolio while most kids were still figuring out uni preferences.

Behind the scenes, his fingerprints are all over modern pop and rap. He helped shape Ruel’s breakout era, working on the EP that gave us Younger, records that dragged Australian pop into a more global lane. From there the radius kept widening: production and writing work with Denzel Curry, JP THE WAVY, WILYWNKA, SIRUP, Leon Fanourakis, Cody Jon, Thomas Headon and a long list of alt-pop and rap names across Australia and Japan.

That studio grind has quietly turned into serious numbers. Between his own releases and other people’s records he’s clocked billions of streams, and his recent work with HYBE’s girl group KATSEYE on Touch pushed him onto the Billboard Global 200. At the same time he’s been shaping J-pop and Japanese hip hop from Sydney, producing runs of tracks for SIRUP and WILYWNKA, plus cuts for MAZZEL that have landed on Billboard Japan and Spotify Japan’s Viral charts.

For Australian audiences, a big on-ramp was triple j. In 2020 he walked into Like A Version, flipped Kanye’s Jesus Walks with A.Girl, Emalia and Gia Vorne and walked out with a performance Rolling Stone Australia called “an anthem for the current times”. In the same session he ran Only U with Gia in the booth, live on air, showing he wasn’t just the producer in the shadows but an artist who could steer his own project in real time.

Only U is a good entry point to that side of him.Built around Gia Vorne’s vocal that Taka famously kept from an early demo take because it felt too right to touch.

An encore show for Diamonds arrived later and shifted the focus again. It was his first big single without a guest feature, a one-man statement built from drums, synths and the kind of sound design he usually spends on other people. Triple j framed it as “a masterclass in vibes”, which is a neat way of saying he knows how to make a three-minute track feel like its own little world without crowding it. NME picked it up as his return single of 2020, pairing it in coverage with Only U and pointing out that this was the moment he stepped properly into his own lane as a solo artist.

On Mood on the Roof, Diamonds becomes even more of a flex. The Encore performance has him up there on his own, switching between instruments and live looping, rebuilding the track in front of the camera instead of hiding behind a laptop. It plays like a producer showreel with actual stakes; if the timing is off, the whole thing falls apart. Instead it feels controlled and effortless, the kind of set that makes sense once you know this is the same guy being trusted with major-label budgets in Tokyo, Seoul and Los Angeles.

That is the tension that makes Taka Perry interesting right now. In one world he is the quiet architect behind other people’s careers, glued to a screen in studios from Sydney to Tokyo. In the other he is the artist on the roof, running Diamonds and bringing Only U to life with Gia Vorne, putting a face to the name you keep seeing in liner notes. And his catalogue is starting to read like a map of where pop, hip hop and R&B are heading next rather than just where they’ve been.