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If you’ve opened TikTok recently, you’re likely already familiar with alt-rock star Towa Bird. In 2021, she found a following on that platform recording guitar solos over hit songs, her talents quickly getting the attention of people like Willow Smith and Tyler, the Creator. Since then, Bird has signed with Interscope Records; made her major-label debut with the single “Wild Heart”; been named a new star to watch by Rolling Stone; joined her girlfriend Reneé Rapp on tour in North America and Europe; and released a five-song EP titled Live From Terminal 5.
Yet Bird has even more to be excited about this summer: Her long-awaited debut album, American Hero, is set to come out in late June. “This record is based on the ’60s and ’70s classic rock bands that I grew up listening to—like, with my dad in his Honda—combined with more modern indie-rock bands, like The Vaccines, Kasabian, and Blur,” Bird tells Vogue over Zoom from Los Angeles. “So, I guess it’s kind of like a mixture of all that, being reborn into this little gay kid over here.”
Born in Hong Kong to Filipino and English parents, Bird, 25, started her globe-trotting early, spending much of her childhood between Thailand and London. After first picking up a guitar at age seven—and then dropping it until she was roughly 12—she learned to play by strumming along with her favorite songs, and seeking out guitarists who looked like her. “Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs was the first time I saw an Asian woman being so unabashedly herself and so amazing with the crowd,” Bird says. “I think seeing her gave me a little hope. Initially, I started learning [guitar] online, and then a little bit later, I got a teacher. He taught me how, most importantly, to feel music and not just play it.”
Forming her first band at 14, Bird played in a string of dive bars and street festivals in Hong Kong before enrolling at Goldsmiths, University of London. Two years in, however, she dropped out to focus on her music—which, for a time, meant producing and co-writing for other artists while she posted her guitar solos on TikTok.
It was during this restless, searching period that she began to hone her sound. “I started sort of building what [an album] would sound like, and I had some really terrible ideas. Once I trashed those, it was like, Okay, what is happening in my heart? And I remembered the bands and the sounds I grew up on,” Bird remembers, identifying Jimi Hendrix, Joan Jett, and Prince as longtime inspirations. When writing, there is typically “a concept that I’m headed towards—whether a certain story, an evening, or an experience—that will be kind of the North Star energetically,” she explains. “For me, songs are always like a puzzle of lived experience. You have that story in your bones and know exactly what that feeling was. Then, it’s just about how I can articulate that efficiently and make it rhyme.”
At its core, American Hero is about “being completely honest about queer love and all its essence. There’s a lot of yearning and vulnerability and dealing with difficult emotions,” she continues. “I grew up listening to so many male-gaze-y love songs, and it was important to put something out into the world that felt like the music I wanted for myself when I was a kid.”
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After six months of tinkering, Bird spent the next year solidifying her cheekily titled debut. (As she readily points out, Bird is neither American, nor does she consider herself especially heroic, but American Hero sure sounds cool.) For a moment last fall, she thought that she had finished it—only to discover otherwise while touring. Being on the road turned into something like field research. “That was the first time I ever really got to play these songs live and get live feedback, just from the crowd. Those reactions are really honest,” she muses. “That informed the rest of the album. When I came home, I was like, Okay, never mind. I’m actually not done. So I added three more songs.”
As a whole, American Hero serves up a deliciously fun set of tracks that could come from the soundtrack to your favorite early 2000s guilty-pleasure movie. Made with live performance in mind, the album feels like sitting on someone’s shoulders at a summer music festival, even when its storytelling gestures at heartbreak. Just take her latest single, “Sorry Sorry,” a bittersweet anthem exploring the painful uncertainties and insecurities of falling in love with a friend.
It seems like only a matter of time before Bird is playing in a stadium near you, or spotted in a cool-kid fashion campaign. The musician herself, however, remains humble and starry-eyed ahead of her first album launch. “It’s a really beautiful mix of incredible, not-able-to-sleep-anxiety with genuine excitement,” she says. “There’s also so much love because I’ve put so much time, care, and personal stories into this album. So there’s a lot of me there.”
American Hero is out on June 28.
