Towa Chicken is the rock & roll firecracker we want proper now. She’s the type of upstart guitar shredder who comes alongside saying issues like “I simply wish to be the lesbian Paul McCartney.” That takes perspective, type of like calling your debut album American Hero. However Chicken doesn’t lack for confidence. All although her rise to the highest, she’s been a real believer—she actually needs to be your new favourite queer Asian feminine glam-rock star.
The 25-year-old singer-songwriter was born in Hong Kong to Filipino and English mother and father, and spent most of her childhood between Thailand and London, obsessing over her dad’s classic-rock album assortment, impressed by legends just like the Kinks, Joan Jett, and Prince. She’s been taking part in guitar ever since she was 12, wherever she may scrounge up a crowd, which has by no means been an issue for her.
Towa Chicken made her title through the pandemic, doing viral guitar covers on TikTok, as she ripped her solos over her favourite pop and rock tunes, from Infantile Gambino to Supertramp. She received many followers that method—together with Olivia Rodrigo, who introduced her on board for her 2021 doc Driving House 2 U (A Bitter Movie), the place Chicken performs guitar on “Brutal.” Since then it’s been one coup after one other. She launched her single “Wild Coronary heart” final 12 months, marveling at how a brand new love managed to tame her, with the hook, “I’m Indiana Jones, you’re my final campaign.” She dropped her Reside at Terminal 5 EP along with her rowdy model of Blur’s “Music 2.” She’s been touring with label mate Renée Rapp, incomes kudos from Billie Eilish, and getting ready her long-awaited debut album.
American Hero is a group of 13 succinct pop-punk punches to the chin, within the high-energy mode of singles like “Wild Coronary heart” and “Sorry Sorry.” “FML” units the tone proper from the beginning with three minutes of melodic guitar crunch, as she describes her ideally suited of romantic bliss: “Sit on the sofa and watch Jennifer’s Physique/Let you know she’s scorching after which say that I’m sorry.”
Chicken brings her personal outspoken flash to all the things on American Hero, from the break-up kiss-off “Deep Reduce” to the sheer lust of “Drain Me!” She wilds out on her guitar, going for an Eighties rock sound someplace on the Neal Schon/Elliot Easton cusp. It is sensible that “Brutal” is the music she performed with O-Rod, since that’s the essential musical premise right here, in songs exploring the size of queerness, id, and romance. “Sorry, Sorry” is Chicken at her most weak, a music about two buddies hesitating on the brink of turning into lovers. She warns, “If we’re beginning one thing / It’ll be the beginning of the tip / Don’t need one other lover if it means dropping you as a buddy.”
As you’d anticipate from music titles like “Drain Me!,” she’s acquired a Nineties rock jones, particularly the sound of Britpop guitar bands like Elastica, Blur, and Supergrass, in addition to MTV Buzz Bin bangers like Veruca Salt and The Breeders. You can too hear 2000s NYC rockers just like the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs—like so many artists of her technology, Chicken acquired her thoughts blown by discovering punk goddess Karen O, calling it “the primary time I noticed an Asian girl being so unabashedly herself.”
“This Isn’t Me” is the pick-to-click right here. It says so much about Chicken that she’s so at dwelling reveling in her world-class rock-star charisma, she’s already acquired an awesome tune about how powerful it’s to be a rock star—she’s bored by all of the limos and jets and caviar, asking, “Is it too late to say I actually hate this?” She tweaks all of the classic-rock tropes on why it’s lonely on the prime, with the refrain, “This isn’t me, I’m not right here,” quoting Michael Stipe’s well-known recommendation to Thom Yorke on the right way to deal with the movie star hustle. It takes verve to place a music like that in your debut. (It took Bob Seger six albums to get to “Flip The Web page.”) However among the best issues about Towa Chicken is that for her, verve is rarely briefly provide.