NoSo and the other side of fantasy

Hwong’s first record, Stay Proud of Me, lives in that potential, almost like a fantasy. But on the soon-to-be-released follow up When Are You Leaving?, his feet have finally hit the ground. The record is the reality of what happens after living in fantasy and want for so long. In Hwong’s case, getting there happened after finally transitioning, but as with most new beginnings, having what you want after so much time chasing it doesn’t necessarily fix everything.

“The way that I interacted with people prior to coming into myself is so much different,” Hwong explains. “It was interesting for me to see the way dynamics shift naturally in being more comfortable in who I am. In a lot of ways, I just feel like a different person — someone who I’ve always hoped to be. For so many years, it felt a bit like a performance, to some extent. In terms of the fantasy versus reality, one aspect is that it didn’t solve all my problems. But it’s also been just experiencing things from a more authentic standpoint."

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“It hit me the other day how much I’ve changed. I was just so angry and upset for so many years. I think I just realised how much more peaceful I am getting to express myself in this way,” he explains.

Getting into album mode again always requires assuming a certain form, but this time around especially so. After all, Hwong is now off the deep end in tackling his most mature project to date. Just before we speaks, he opened for Khruangbin in the UK at Gunnersbury Park, one of his biggest slots yet. Coming up as an LA songwriter, Hwong explains, has conditioned him to see all of this as a big blessing; one that’s not given. The norm for most rising artists is playing for almost empty venues and pounding the pavement again and again. This career, he often reminds himself, is not for the faint hearted, but with each decision to get back out on stage, to keep writing, and to keep releasing, Hwing affirms his commitment to his craft once again.

When Hwong’s family first made the move from Illinois to California, he felt like the earth had fallen out from beneath him, but as he got to know his new city, he realised the change was transformative. In Illinois, he had lived in a white-majority town, something that at times made him feel othered and disconnected. The move itself only provided more social angst, at least at first yet his parents argued that being in LA would provide invaluable exposure to a broader Korean community.

Looking back, he knows they were right. “It was so important for me to experience,” Hwong says. It was in LA that the world started opening up for him: “I do think people who shit on LA are maybe just hanging out with the wrong circles,” he laughs. “Native LA people are some of the best people that you’ll ever meet. So humble, so community oriented. The food is so good.”

Settled in one of the biggest cultural hubs in the world, Hwong also began performing publicly. He attended USC’s Thornton School of Music, a program known for its army of esteemed popstar alumni – a list that includes MUNA, Remi Wolf, Jensen McRae, and more. The school is something of a hit factory, in no small part because of the gruelling regime it takes its students through – sets in diners for almost no one, intense showcases, and the like. “Most musicians I meet are from USC, from different years, whether it’s in the jazz program or the pop program. It feels like such a strong influence on the LA scene, and I feel really grateful for that,” he says. “It’s the least surprising to me when I see someone from USC popping off. It’s like, seeing Remi, I always knew she was a star, even back then. It’s just like everyone else caught up and was late to the game.”

Both at USC and before, Hwong dedicated his time to honing his craft. He learned the art of guitar theory and of production, the latter becoming so engrained in his practice that he sees it as synonymous with his songwriting itself. That Hwong is an incredibly precise music theorist shouldn’t be hard to guess. His records — from Stay Proud of Me to the early cuts of When Are You Leaving? — strike that precarious balance between displaying technical mastery and providing pop listenability. Underlying shimmering hooks and earworms is often instrumentation brimming with innovation and moodiness, contrasting bubbly melodies with impressive complexity. Most exciting, on the new record, Hwong has leaned more heavily into live band influences, bringing bigger arrangements to the table bolster his writing.

“From going to USC and having a really specific experience where we were performing covers in front of each other every week, so in a way it’s created this thick skin or resilience. I’ve had so many moments from growing up in the LA scene of a really hard show playing to no one, and then on the drive home being like: Do I love this? Do I truly love this?” Hwong explains. “My Dad has always said that you have to love every part of [being a musician]. You can’t just love the highs.” Each day Hwong chooses to make music is a day he asks himself that question.

As he made his debut, Stay Proud of Me, Hwong moved back into his childhood bedroom with his parents to wait out the pandemic. Given how close the family is, Hwong says this was a welcome detour and “kind of a beautiful experience.” A large part of When Are You Leaving? was made that way, too, though there was some moving around. The constant, though, was that Hwong was almost always on his own and left to his own devices with his home setup. This, he says, is where he’s most comfortable. He doesn’t like when other people engineer his voice, for instance, and finds the largesse of professional studios somewhat sterile compared to the familiarity of home.

Though he loves collaborating, Hwong tells me that he’s never thrived in big professional studio setups. He describes the limitation of only having a desk, laptop, interface, and a few guitars and instruments as something of a palette cleanser, an invitation to thoughtfully sit with the music rather than rip through tech tools in an endless production scramble. Overhead lighting and a million different buttons turned out to be detrimental to his work. Exchanging those sterile rooms for the creature comforts of home — like little mementos on a desk, letters from fans at shows and objects from family — helps.

Hwong began writing When Are You Leaving? almost immediately after the making of Stay Proud of Me wrapped in 2021. Though the debut was helpful for Hwong in exploring his gender identity, there was more he had to unpack. Transitioning helped Hwong put down his armour and become who he wanted to be. But even after becoming that person, he still had both old wounds and new left to process.

Part of what Hwong wanted to do with his post-debut follow up was exchange the whimsy of Stay Proud of Me for a deeper darkness, pushing the comfortable boundaries of his exploration his vulnerabilities as far as they could go. While still keeping a certain coziness and nostalgia — as is typical of the NoSo world — he manages to dissect the decision to leave a tumultuous relationship, existential anxieties about masculinity, and learning how to let peace in after so long without it.

“Making an album, I think for me, is arduous, but it should be that way," he tells me. "I think if it was the easiest thing in the world, that’s when it’s kind of questionable, because it could possibly imply that I’m not pushing myself to do something different."

Songs were written and rewritten, with various versions each exploring a selection of the same events and emotions until the composition was just right. Hwong would revisit these drafts with fresh ears until he found something that felt true and unforced. “Nara,” for example — a song about emotional turbulence and the never-ending worry of being ‘man enough’ — existed in several iterations before taking on its final form. “A lot of my ideas that are more avant garde or interesting in terms of background vocal arrangements always come at weird points in the day when I’m alone,” he says.

Being alone also helps Hwong access the intimate corners of his mind that make up his narratives, in which he tells me he tries to even “dip into surrealist territory.” He focuses just as much on what could happen in a given situation or how he subjectively felt about what happened as what actually did. The narration of his work, then, can be seen as occasionally unreliable, blurring what is projection and what is reality. “That blending of the two is really interesting for me in songwriting,” he tells me.

“It’s kind of a theme of all my songwriting, but it’s especially very pertinent in ‘Nara.’ What actually occurred and what I felt in the dynamic was so different of what I’m expressing of not being man enough or whatever. That’s so not how I felt. That in itself is what made me kind of an unreliable narrator,” he continues.

Given that so many of these songs detail with low points and points of major insecurity, those blurred lines make sense. Often, Hwong’s songs become a battle between the more rational parts of himself and the ones that always jump to the worst possible conclusions. On “A Believable Boy,” for example, Hwong dives straight into his worst recurring nightmare. In the dream, he’d see his top surgery somehow reverse itself and everyone around him called him by his deadname. Making the track was a way to document — and perhaps, through that, try to unpack or overcome — those fears. “Who Made You This Sweet?” also interrogates the relationship between the anxious mind and the rational one, parsing through the difficulties that can come with adjusting to a healthy relationship after so long in tumultuous ones.

I mention to Hwong that admitting to some kind of distance between reality and fiction in songwriting seems harder to come by these days. It’s refreshing to hear him lean into it. The trend of the moment, after all, seems to be songs that are prescriptively autobiographical, and audiences tend to look for real life parallels in every line. But songwriters have more to offer, and to discount writing beyond what’s strictly literal seems almost a snub at the literary abilities of musicians. Even though Hwong knows this is the urge of the moment, he tells me he stays relatively unbothered by it. At the very least, he doesn’t let it influence how he works.

“There’s definitely been moments where I think, Oh, man, this is a little much, or I think that something’s too honest. For certain lyrics I worry that things will probably be taken literally by people when it could be a metaphor. But I think it’s just trusting music lovers and audiences alike are going to listen to it without immediately asking what it means,” Hwong says. “In the same way when we read books or consume any kind of media, there’s always that level of critical analysis.”

Fiction is a big part of NoSo’s universe — both as a technique and as an inspiration. Movies and books are integral to his writing practice and he sees both as fundamentally linked to his output. His visual aesthetics on this record, for example, have been heavily influenced by the work of Wong Kar-wai, often contrasting dark and intimate rooms with neon lighting to create a somewhat ominous undertone.

“It’s almost as important to me as listening to music or practicing,” he says of drawing inspiration from other mediums. In addition to Kar-wai’s movies, he also cited Genevieve Hudson’s Southern Gothic novel Boyd Of Alabama as a major touchstone, helping him lean into the moodiness he was trying to convey. The movie Past Lives helped him define the thematic throughline of the record itself, dealing with how relationships either survive or succumb to external pressures and anxieties. “It’s like what I was saying earlier about jumping to the worst conclusions,” Hwong says. “I was in a very vulnerable state and thinking that maybe my gender and outside opinions infiltrated a dynamic that could have been the demise of it. On ‘Nara,’ that song is wondering if other people didn’t find anything humorous or polarising about my identity, and there was no outside pressure, then perhaps the dynamic could have survived.”

He’s even taking to screenwriting as a method of blowing off creative steam. “I do it just for fun. There’s a few that I’m always writing, and there’s this one series I have that’s like 10 seasons long,” he tells me. Having those living documents allows him to get anything and everything out of his head and onto the page. “Exercising different creative parts of my brain is always helpful for music.”

When I probe him more on the series, he says he’s written it around a few gay kids in Korea, hanging out and going on random adventures. “It’s remained such a constant in my life,” he laughs. Exploring his Korean heritage, too, has been something of a constant. On “Nara,” he sings in Korean for the first time. The album title itself is a Korean idiom, one Hwong stumbled upon in a chance Internet search. Despite not having lived in Korea, the spectre of his culture is always subconsciously present in his work. “I’ve been told by other Korean people that the lyrics feel so Korean because they yearn so much. So much traditional Korean music is just ballads and yearning,” he says.

Hwong only started learning Korean in his 20s, but he did it as a way to feel closer to the culture he was raised in. Having been brought up first in a primarily white town and then transplanted to LA, part of his growing process has been “healing” his relationship to his Korean identity. Learning the language and leaning into all that the language brought with it was the thing that felt most accessible.

As he gets ready to release When Are You Leaving? into the world, Hwong knows his work is done. He finished the album’s closer, “Let It Die,” last, and as soon as it was done, he knew his body of work was complete. Even in the moments when he may want a project to be done, to just be rid of the strife of creating a record, he has to wait until he has that gut feeling that it’s ready. Finally, after “Let It Die,” he did. While NoSo has always been a vehicle for Hwong to embrace radical honesty, on this record, he’s embracing that truth more authentically than ever before.