Cover photo taken by Joel Barney & Oscar Ferguson (@_bttr_half)
As the music landscape continues to evolve faster than ever, tapping into the zeitgeist is a daunting task. Nevertheless, it’s something that British-Burmese artist Lucy Tun does with ease. Musically, lyrically, and aesthetically, Lucy gives the impression of someone who has an intuitive grasp of internet culture– her singles “Kulture Klub” and “Airport Smoking Room” just recently found viral success on TikTok.
Following years of going by her producer/DJ alias LCYTN, Unreal is Lucy’s first project under her own name. It shows off a genre-spanning versatility that’s uniquely hers, with each track playing into her broad range of skills. Dreamy electronics and poppy beats come together seamlessly on the EP, making an intimate, danceable experience that’s ready for both the club and the living room. We got the opportunity to sit down and talk to Lucy about Unreal’s release, the edges of reality and fantasy, and being reflective of the times.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Chloe Gonzales & Ethan Kung
Chloe Gonzales: Congratulations on your new EP, Unreal ! How does it feel to have it out finally? How long was it in the works for?
Lucy Tun: A really long time. The first song was made almost two or three years ago. So it’s been quite a long and spread out process of getting it together. It feels really good to have that out and in the world, but I needed two weeks after it was out to just vegetate, and ruminate, and marinate, and take it in. Yeah, I feel super happy that it’s out.
Ethan Kung: You also just recently had your release party, and it looked like a lot of fun. How’d that feel?
Lucy: Oh my god, it was amazing. It was my first headline-ish show. I actually didn’t perform live a lot this year because I was focusing on putting music out, and I wanted to save a live performance for when there was a big moment. It felt really good. It was chaotic at times, it was so busy. I have so many funny stories from that night, and it was also the first time that I actually got to meet new and old fans, because I haven’t done a lot of shows. I think the craziest thing that night was when someone told me that they drove two and a half hours to be at the show, and they got stuck in traffic because a car broke down in the middle of the road.
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Ethan: Across your EP’s seven tracks, there’s a really wide range of influences, from the hip-hop beat on a song like “Kulture Klub” to the really chugging 90’s guitar work on “Rabbit Hole”. Is there a particular style on any of these songs that you can see yourself going further into in your future work?
Lucy: I really like that question. A lot of these songs are made at different points in my life. It was a time of personal growth. I was in uni and I was studying a completely different degree that isn’t music; I was actually studying an economics degree. So I was meeting a lot of different people – London is a very multicultural hub of melting cultures – and I was joining a lot of different music scenes as well. Each song was made in a time when I was in a different musical or cultural scene. So for me, this EP is a celebration of all of that growth, but as it’s my first EP, I just wanted to really lay everything out flat and be like, “this is everything that I’ve been exploring”. I wanted to see what stuck and what didn’t stick.
That’s definitely been my entire year, just seeing how people react to songs that I’ve made. I am very self conscious about my art. Do you know that Kanye West documentary [jeen-yuhs] where he’s playing his music to people, and they’re like ‘get out of my office’? I was almost the antithesis of that – I was very self conscious of playing my music. So to have it out in the world and seeing how people have reacted, I think I’ve learnt a lot from it. There’s definitely some parts of each song that I really want to package together for the next project. I want to be a lot more focused, a lot more direct.
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Ethan: Speaking of the guitar on “Rabbit Hole,” your older brother Daniel played that track’s guitar riff. What’s your family’s relationship with making music?
Lucy: I don’t really come from a musical family. My parents, they both work non-creative jobs. There’s no one in my *laughs* ancestral family tree who’s done anything remotely creative. My dad and my brother are the two people that I would say are creative or interested in music. A lot of my music taste comes from – well, I hate to say it and he will love me saying this – but it does come a lot from my brother. When I first started producing music and making my own songs, I didn’t know how to play guitar. I would always ask him to record some loops, and then I would take that and sample it.
I remember when I first started showing my music to people with his guitar samples in it, everyone was like, “ah, this is kind of indie y’know, this sounds like indie rock kind of vibes”, and I was like, “yeah, but I don’t listen to that kind of music!” *laughs* I’m listening to Adele and K-Pop, really mainstream poppy stuff. This was in the beginning, so I think that my brother is the first person that I ever started collaborating with musically. But he doesn’t have a creative job, it just kind of started off as a hobby between us. He’s actually in my band currently – it’s a family affair!
Ethan: You also sampled a Jai Paul song on a LCYTN mixtape and talked about getting his approval. Do you think there’s any potential for a collaboration in the future?
Lucy: I actually got to meet him for the first time at his show in London around two or three months ago. I’ve actually worked with his brother as well, A.K. Paul. They’re a sibling duo and I can see the parallels between me and my brother and them – my brother and I are huge fans of them. I mean, we both kind of grew up in the same area. So it was a big moment to meet and speak to him. He’s so nice! I can’t say anything as of yet, but…
So for me, this EP is a celebration of all of that growth, but as it’s my first EP, I just wanted to really lay everything out flat and be like, “this is everything that I’ve been exploring”.
Ethan: That sounds promising!
Chloe: We also wanted to talk about some thematics in your new EP, particularly Norway, because you mention Norwegian Wood and flying to Norway. Are there more themes that you incorporated into your EP and was mentioning Norway a coincidence or a deliberate choice?
Lucy: It was purely coincidental, there was no deliberate choice of Norway when I was writing and making the songs. I found it really surprising when I was teasing my music online, people really picked up on the Norwegian line in “ADHD”, which when I was writing it, I wasn’t thinking that it would be the bit that everyone was going to remember. Writing “Airport Smoking Room”, I was wondering what sounds similar to ‘nowhere,’ like what’s a country… because it was inspired by that story [The Terminal Man], and wanted to play on flying off to somewhere. Then, when I was rolling out the songs people were saying “you really like Norway!”
Chloe: *laughs* You kind of have to make it your brand now, like promotional content to Norway!
Lucy: Yeah, and people would message me “come to Norway”! Instead of “come to Brazil!” it’s “Come to Norway!”
Chloe: That’s kind of sick though, it’s like– at least for us [Americans] it’s a random country.
Lucy: I’m like, “oh my god, this is the defining legacy of Lucy”.
And for the themes that I think span across all the songs [off the EP], and this is what ties into the name of the EP as well – is when I was writing songs, my prize was finishing them. Not really thinking that anything was going to be a body of work together. But when I reflected on it after, I looked through the songs, and the lyrics, and the instrumentation, and was like, “okay, the themes that crop up are these ideas of reality and fantasy and the playing of the two”. It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways.
“Kulture Klub” for example was about the life of a fashion socialite and the fantastical, glamourous, glitzy things that she sees and experiences, and then the harsher realities. “Clementine” is about a forbidden love, dreaming and looking towards this future that’s never going to happen and being stuck in this reality. I kind of noticed that theme from all the songs, and played that out in my visuals too. I write a lot about loneliness and change – change in friends and circumstances in romantic relationships. It’s all about moving from one place to another.
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Chloe: Looking at your socials and promotional content, you definitely have an aesthetic including cyber, y2k, ethereal, etc. How did you find your style? Especially with these aesthetics being trendy right now, do you ever struggle with making it your own or how do you make it original to yourself? Not saying that you are simply copying trends, but wonder if that is something that you think about.
Lucy: No, I totally get what you mean. I think that in the digital age, we’re all really influenced by similar things, and with the conversations I have with friends they’re like, “Oh, did you see this? Are you on this side of Tik Tok?” We’re all very much more connected now– being online– and I think lockdown exacerbated that. A lot of my friends who are musicians, we all share creative ideas too. For me there’s a ‘child-like wondrous kid’ kind of aesthetic that I really have. I really love how I’ve not cared about color schemes, and I just wanted everything to be as colorful and fantastical as possible. I worked with a lot of amazing people on things like posters for “ADHD,” music video visuals – [those are] a pretty heavy part of this campaign and the songs and I really just wanted to play into that.
When you’re putting out music for the first time, how I wanted to do it was to go as far and as wide as I could with my work. Spread it out all on the table, because something that I speak about with my other musician friends is feeling boxed in, being put into a certain kind of aesthetic or genre. For me, with this campaign, I wanted to still be me but just be like “you know what, I’m just gonna go with what feels right.” And everything that was there is what I thought was right at the time. I think it’s also an artist’s job to be reflective of the times, and I feel like my work is also reflected in that.
Chloe: In another interview we saw that Björk, for example, was a musical influence – we were wondering if you had any inspiration from her regarding your aesthetic.
Lucy: I actually drew a lot of inspiration from Post. I don’t know if you listened to her podcast [Bjork: Sonic Symbolism]
Chloe & Ethan: Yes!
Ethan: It’s so good.
Lucy: Yeah! So I was inspired by her in the beginning because when I finished the songs I had around 50 that were all in the running of being in the EP.
Chloe: 50?? That’s crazy.
Lucy: Yeah and I was like, “how am I gonna whittle this down?” I would go to my local pub and sit there with my hoodie on at 3pm.
Chloe: Ooo so mysterious *laughs*
Lucy: *laughs* All the people at the pub were probably like, “oh my God, she’s here again.”
I was really trying to think about the EP as a body of work together, and in Björk’s podcast she talks about each album and breaks it down – she uses 5 to 20 words in each podcast to describe the feeling of her albums, and I was really inspired to do that with my EP. If I didn’t do that, then I wouldn’t have been as inspired to also make those kinds of visuals [for the EP]. I also think that she has so many questions – like when I think about her I just see her as someone that’s always asking questions about everything, always curious, and always wants to learn and experiment more and not really be boxed in.
Ethan: Something very iconic about Post is that all the songs are really distinct and draw from a lot of inspirations, but they come together to be very cohesive, which is something shared by your EP.
Lucy: I think that Post feels quite industrial as well. And London, I don’t know if you guys have been to London, but it’s an ever changing place. It’s so densely packed and some areas are like a concrete jungle. I think that living in London, being British has also inspired a lot of the sounds, genres, and themes of the EP, which has a slightly industrial sound as well.
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Ethan: So Spotify Wrapped just came out. We were wondering: what did yours look like?
Lucy: So I’m part of this group chat called “Loud London” and it’s all female musicians. There’s almost like 100 girls in the group chat and it spans across lots of different genres but we were putting in our Spotify Wrapped in there and asking like, “did you get yourself??” So many of us did and, not going to lie guys, I was in my own Spotify Wrapped.
Chloe: That’s so interesting?? When do you play your own music?
Lucy: Well I think it’s more like, something when the song is out, you’re gonna be like, “hey, does this sound good?”
Chloe: Ohh I see, I see.
Lucy: I need to like – to ingest it in a way that’s not just a mp3 on my emails. I need to listen to it in the app and make sure it sounds good.
Chloe: I get what you mean like see how other people perceive it and how they are listening to it.
I think it’s also an artist’s job to be reflective of the times, and I feel like my work is also reflected in that.
Ethan: Yeah, putting yourself in the listener’s perspective. What were your other top artists?
Lucy: So my number one is Caroline Polachek. Second is me *laughs*. Third is an artist called Bawo – he’s a hip-hop/rap artist from London. He’s amazing, you should check him out. He dropped an album earlier this year which I listened to so much. Fourth is an artist called Nana Lourdes, who is amazing. And five is Amaarae, who is a big inspiration and her album also dropped this year.
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Ethan: So wrapping things up, our DJs that have a radio show pick their name. Aside from your established moniker LCYTN, what would your DJ name be?
Lucy: I actually do gigs on the side as a DJ! But if I had to pick a different name, it would probably be like DJ crochetluverxx_xx or something like that.
Chloe: Waittt like a myspace-esq.
Lucy: *laughs* Yes, just something really long and confusing and unnecessary.
Check out Lucy Tun’s socials & new EP Unreal below!
