Throughout our history of loving music, Asian Americans have had to scroll through downloads, playlists, articles and liner notes, and accept that a lot of it isn’t written with us in mind. In the United States, the pop or rock star archetype is often white and blond, a rumpled Brooklynite. It doesn’t leave much room for dark skin and hair smoothed with oil, hands folding dough for dinner — or much else that we know intimately.
In recent years, an increased awareness about the unique marginalization Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) face has helped slowly change their underrepresentation in music. Now, AAPI artists like Raveena, Japanese Breakfast and Olivia Rodrigo sprout national recognition with their artistry, diversifying popular music and putting a crack in the long held picture of a white pop star. But there are still more stones to throw.
U.S. popular music needs to embrace the full spectrum of AAPI artists — across genres, lyrical content, skin color and heritage — and refrain from exoticizing and fetishizing the few Asian artists promoted to the main stage. Nor should AAPI artists be forced into constricting narratives about their immigrant parents or being bullied as children. Instead, they must be allowed to experiment, create and fail with as much grace and energy as white artists.
The goal of diversity initiatives and representation isn’t to create novelty, but remove it completely. Non-white artists shouldn’t be an exception to the rule, but part of it. For Asian American and Pacific Islander Month, which takes place in May each year, GRAMMY.com has put together a list of emerging AAPI artists you should know.Though AAPI representation in music is just the smallest slice of racial equity, it’s still a slice. With this list of emerging AAPI artists, which is by no means exhaustive, you can help level music’s playing field as long as you’re willing to listen.
Luna Li
The Korean-Canadian indie rocker Luna Li is all about controlled energy. Her debut album Duality, released March 4, is weaved together with the same delicate intricacy you typically reserve for tying flower crowns. But instead of flowers, the album is frosted with twinkling high hats and crystal, crying strings.
Li’s skill at creating quietly vibrating songs, like her breakout single "Afterglow," released in 2020, or the instrumental, buzzy "harp jam" from her 2021 jams EP makes sense. She’s a multi-hyphenate producer, composer and player of piano, guitar, and harp — among other things — and her skill floats effortlessly into each warbling press of the keyboard, as well as breathy acknowledgements of her loneliness and love.
Wallice
Headlines about 23-year-old Wallice usually call out two things: she’s a jazz school dropout and she makes killer indie pop. A New York Times profile notes that Wallice (who identifies as half-Japanese, half-white) first burst onto the scene in 2020, when her song "Punching Bag" landed on Spotify’s teen-movie-friendly "Lorem" playlist. But when you listen to the song, don’t expect to hear much music school influence (Wallice was only there for a year, after all), just enjoy the swing of her voice, her self-conscious melancholy as she identifies as "emotionally available in my dreams."
In the two years since her Spotify coronation, Wallice has been busy getting bigger. She has been consistently releasing sassy, pulsing singles on Dirty Hit, the London-based label home to alt-pop favorites like The 1975 and Rina Sawayama, and will release a concept EP called 90’s American Superstar on May 6.
Weston Estate
Four of slick-as-a-lollipop R&B band Weston Estate’s five members are South Asian (vocalist Marco Luka is Cuban-American), and happily brand themselves as "ya aunty’s favorite boyband."
"Straight-edged middle aged women getting lit to our music is our aesthetic," they snark in a press release. They may joke, but South Asian commenters on the Weston Estate TikTok note how they "love the brown boy representation" — and no aspiring aunty could be fully immune to this brown boyband’s charms.
Like the world learned with Brockhampton and BTS, boybands haven’t been composed of homogeneous swaths of white denim since the early 2000s. Instead, they’ve evolved to reflect the diversity and sensitivity of the modern American man. The gentle mourning found on Weston Estate’s recently-released EP, Maggie Valley, represents the advent of the earnest boyband.
As a whole, Weston Estate’s success solidifies that South Asians should no longer accept acting as supporting role fodder; it’s time for us to lead.
Kainalu
The Japanese and Hawaiian Trent Prall, who makes wooly psychedelic funk as Kainalu, wasn’t always confident about his race. "I moved to the Midwest as a teenager and began being bullied because [of] my race shortly after," Prall recalled in an interview with the Aussie World. He resented his ethnic background for a while, but Kainalu (the Hawaiian word for ocean wave) as part of his "journey of self-acceptance."
"I think that drives the music for me," he said.
You hear his confidence bloom in the music. Prall’s 2019 album Lotus Gate and his just-released single "Revelator" seem to drip with sunshine and orange juice. Whenever keyboards stomp, low and insistently, or stray bass notes dip in and out like lingering pool flies, Kainalu’s voice cuts through it; he seems to stand tall, like the director of his own dream.
OHYUNG
Robert Ouyang Rusli has been creating inhaling, exhaling experimental music as OHYUNG since 2018. OHYUNG feels like a boundless project — Rusli tips their hand into every jar. In 2021, OHYUNG had a music residency at Pioneer Works, a New York non-profit and cultural center. Previously, OHYUNG made unreal, unrelenting experimental rap on albums like the 2018 debut Untitled (Chinese Man with a Flame) and 2020’s PROTECTOR. Rusli also composes music for film under their given name. In other words, if you’re looking for fire, you found it.
Their newest album imagine naked!, which was released on April 22, is a wordless swear to what makes OHYUNG so intoxicating. The entire album was written and recorded in about three days, but its crackling repetitions and fishbone-light melodies will needle something eternal in the pit of your stomach. It could be your curiosity, or perhaps your pure awe, unleashed.