With a startling jack-of-all-trades approach to her chosen genre, New Jersey hailing Audrey Nuna is bending neo-R&B to her dynamic and diverse will – and she’s changing the game, one hard-hitting minimalistic track at a time.
Born and bred in suburban New Jersey (“the suburbs, of the suburbs”), she always took an interest in sound – but it was only when her Instagram clips caught the attention of Roc Nation producer Anwar Sawyer that the game changed. He scooped her up and the two went on to record over 100 songs together.
That was a couple of years ago – cut to more recent times and Audrey has since been accepted (and subsequently dropped out of) the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University, inked a deal with Sony Arista, dropped a barrage of chart topping hits, and an already lauded debut album, a liquid breakfast.
The album serves as a diary penned while driving her hometown suburbs. It’s a lockdown diary but nothing in it IS typical pandemic drivel. Instead she waxes lyrical on a deluge of innermost thoughts and experiences, cracking a window into the mind of the 22-year-old Korean-American girl making her R&B dreams a reality in her own right. “Never seen a face like mine in the cockpit,” she comments with fiery self confidence in “Typical”.
What sets her apart is both her dynamic vocalism, diverse range (no two tracks slip into similar territory), and an expressive, relatable informality which surfaces with throwback references from brat dolls to Ed, Edd and Eddy. That, and her spirited eagerness to do anything and everything: she’s taken the seat of creative director in every music video she’s put out, and has a growing list of collaborations she’s itching to get started on (think everything from food to fashion).
She oozes cool confidence in her latest video, “Top Again”: a candid, reflective collaboration with rapper Saba, which sees her dipping her toes into hip-hop (which she’s done before, but not quite like this). Snappy and minimal, it’s an end-of-the-world anthem, penned around April 2020. A stop-and-go rhythm, and velvety vocals comment on the duplicity of the entertainment industry as she dons silver-foil fashion before a motorcycle accident lands her up in a pitching hospital.
A melange of the unexpected sets Audrey Nuna compellingly apart, and here we are, desperate for more already.
