There’s a service in Japan where you can pay someone else to quit your job for you, no confrontation, no awkward goodbye, just a text and it’s done. First Love is Never Returned turned that bizarrely modern solution into a song, and it’s the lead track on their first true major-label album.
The five-piece band, all still working regular jobs alongside music, has released their debut full album, “W.O.R.K.S.“. It’s a title that reads as an acronym holding five different meanings at once: work, weekend, weekday; office, ordinary, only, open; real, rock, rhythm & blues; keep, kicks, key, kindness; story, songs, soul, sound.
Twelve tracks, half of them brand new, and this is officially the band’s first release distributed nationwide in physical CD stores, a milestone they’re calling their real major debut, years after quietly setting up their own label with avex and insisting at the time it wasn’t one.
The lead track, “退職代行 Taisyoku Daikou”, is written by vocalist Kazuki Ishida, and it’s exactly as cynical and precise as the concept demands: a song about the very real absurdity of paying a stranger to end your employment for you, built from the inside by someone who lives that reality alongside his own bandmates. The track shifts character entirely between its first and second chorus, using the band’s three vocalists to embody the tension between employee and boss, funk-driven production that tightens and accelerates as the song goes, mirroring exactly the anxiety it’s describing. A companion music video, directed by Honoka Saito, features comedy duo Tosa Brothers, Lucifer Yoshioka, and YouTuber Tamura Kae in a scripted short film built around the same theme.
What makes “W.O.R.K.S.” genuinely unusual is that every single member wrote a song. Ishida takes the majority, but Keita Kotakemori, Arata Yamamoto, Mizuki Tsunemoto and Yuji Sato each contributed one track as main songwriter, a rare structure that turns this into a literal collection of five different people’s voices rather than one frontman’s vision with a backing band.
“TPTTC“, performed live since 2019, is the band’s first entirely English-language track, threading 2000s pop-punk through 2020s US pop with boy-band-style vocal harmonies. Yamamoto’s “Atrium” channels his love of Michael Jackson into a loop-driven mid-tempo groove. Kotakemori’s “期末評価会議 Kimatsu Hyouka Kaigi” was written to deliberately echo “退職代行 Taisyoku Daikou” from the other side of the same conversation, raw workplace frustration turned into the heaviest band-driven live number they’ve ever recorded. Tsunemoto’s “Twilight” and Sato’s “ミッドナイトブルー Midnight Blue” round it out with 80s US pop influence and fusion-inflected AOR (album-oriented rock), respectively, first-time songwriting efforts that hold their own against the rest of the record.
The CD+Blu-ray edition goes further, packing in the band’s first-ever headline show at Shibuya Club Quattro in full, a sold-out night that also served as the stage where this entire album was first announced, plus a documentary tracing the band’s roots back home in Sapporo, and interviews with all five members, close to three hours of material in total.
They’re taking it on the road with #FLiNR ONE-MAN TOUR 26-27 ‘W.O.R.K.S.’, six dates across five cities running November through January, including the band’s first-ever headline shows in Nagoya and Fukuoka, their biggest-capacity attempts yet in Tokyo (Zepp Shinjuku) and Osaka (BIGCAT), and two hometown Sapporo dates bookending the run, opening night at VyPass., their actual home venue, and the tour final at Penny Lane 24.
First Love is Never Returned spent years insisting they weren’t chasing a major debut. “W.O.R.K.S.” is them finally admitting they were wrong about that, on their own terms, in their own words, written entirely by the five people living it.
About First Love is Never Returned
First Love is Never Returned (FLiNR) is a five-piece band based in Hokkaido: Kazuki Ishida (vocals, guitar, keys), Arata Yamamoto (guitar, chorus), Keita Kotakemori (guitar, keys, chorus), Yuji Sato (bass), and Mizuki Tsunemoto (drums). The band is known for Ishida’s distinctive, emotionally direct vocal style, and a sound rooted in R&B that draws freely across a wide range of pop influences.
After more than two years of inactivity during the pandemic, the band resumed activity independently at the end of 2022. They gained early attention through viral media shortly after returning, and won a competitive live audition to secure a slot at RISING SUN ROCK FESTIVAL, drawing notice from both fans and the industry as an emerging voice in pop music.
In spring 2025, the band announced the launch of HEiLO RECORDS, a new label under avex. Their statement at the time, “Honestly, we never wanted a major label,” drew significant attention.
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