brynne Is Championing the Next Generation of Artists
As President of NEXT WORLD Collective, the singer is creating space for young artists to succeed while managing his own rising solo career.
There was once a time that brynne, a nineteen year old singer-songwriter, wasn’t confident enough to tell friends that he makes music.
“I was extremely introverted before I started making music,” he told me last week from his bedroom in the suburbs of Los Angeles. Behind him, Keshi’s “GABRIEL” vinyl was displayed on his wall. “Part of it was because I didn’t have a lot of people who had a similar passion for making music. None of my friends were singer-songwriters or producers. They’d be into drumlines or guitar or choir.”
But over the past year, brynne’s mindset has shifted. He went from having only 200 monthly listeners on Spotify at the beginning of 2023 to now more than 8,000. His music, especially the track “why do i still see you?”, has begun to find an audience. Last month, brynne said, he noticed “+two”, a collaboration with his producer stvphn, reached 2,000 streams in one day. Another collaboration “love is a crime” with his friend and "NEXT WORLD" Collective member, chtha gained over 12,000 streams.
But what really changed for brynne is that he found a community of artists beginning with KU-KAI, another musician who shares an ambitious vision for music and collaboration. “The moment I met Kai and the rest of the people who became core members of "NEXT WORLD" Collective, I slowly started getting used to connecting with more people,” he said. brynne is president of "NEXT WORLD", a collective of musicians, artists, and singers that he and Kai started in 2021.
“Originally we had only been introduced to each other because we’re both musicians. We started talking back and forth until one day we realized we have a lot of connections,” he explained. “So we started this Discord server called “"NEXT WORLD"”. It wasn’t gonna be a crazy big thing, it was really just an excuse to hang out with each other.”
But "NEXT WORLD" began to grow, and the community brynne and Kai built is one where artists can become best friends and collaborate freely. At any given moment, artists on the "NEXT WORLD" server can ask each other to design artwork or collaborate on a track. “I love having this community behind me where we’re all supportive of each other,” he said. “If you need anything, they’re just ready. Since we’re all just friends… We don’t care about the money. It’s just about the art.”
"NEXT WORLD" burst into the real world when Kai approached brynne about staging the collective’s first concert. “I told him he’s crazy because we’re about to go to college and we have no money,” brynne said with a large laugh. Kai agreed: “Yeah, it’s crazy.” But they did it anyway.
The first "NEXT WORLD" concert was held at a Filipino restaurant in November 2022. The show was done on a shoestring budget, funded entirely out of pocket by Kai. “We were figuring things out as we went by,” he said. “We didn't think about things like bathroom situations, which we got so many complaints about how the bathrooms are supposed to work.” brynne laughed when he remembered this. They had no idea what they were doing. “At the time, we were like 17 year olds just putting something together,” he said, He laughed again, “I think we did,” his voice peaked an octave higher, “fine?”
The first show actually did great: the boys sold over 100 tickets. But the most exciting part about the show was that it was the first time brynne met many of the friends he’d been talking to online for more than a year. That’s when things became real.
The group got more efficient by the second concert. The boys built a larger team who helped with logistics and marketing. By the fourth concert, held in October 2023, the group was able to move quickly, which proved to be important because two days before the show, the guys made a last minute decision to switch venues due to issues with the first one. “When I say it was the most efficient I've ever seen a team work,” brynne said proudly, “it was crazy. We had no choice because we had people flying in from cities like New York and Sacramento.. But that was one of the smoothest concerts we ever ran. A lot of people said we stepped it up from our previous one.”
The group found a venue near the airport, a space that could have overpowered performers due to the large number of planes flying into Los Angeles. But that night, the biggest noise came from the show. “We were probably louder than the planes,” he said with a smile. “We blasted the speakers.”
brynne credits the pandemic – and boredom – for his start in music. His artist bio on Spotify, “angsty iPad kid”, accurately describes the teen: The music actually started on his iPad’s GarageBand app, and yeah, the music was a little emo. The beats weren’t the greatest, but brynne remembered, “I had just learned how to play guitar and I could play all the chords needed to do basic things.” The teen kept at it though, posting music to SoundCloud and doing his best to improve the sound with every release.
“It was fun and something to do to pass the time that wasn’t homework,” he said, then added with a shrug, “It was Covid and there was nothing else to do, right?”
The first few songs he made were “like jokes''. Often when brynne would be doing schoolwork, he’d have The Try Guys, a group of guys who will “try pretty much anything for the audience's entertainment”, playing on his iPad. brynne loved watching Keith Harsberger (the Try Guy who likes to bake) and decided to make a snippet based off of Harsberger’s phrase “Daddy’s Favorite”. Harsberger thought it was hilarious and reshared it. Then, brynne made a jingle for another Try Guy, Zach Kornfield’s tea brand. Up until then, brynne wasn’t using vocals for his music. “I was still insecure about my voice,” he said. But he was inspired by Joji and Keshi, whose voices could reach a falsetto that he knew he could achieve. “I was a lot more confident in my falsetto than my chest voice,” he explained, “so I imitated Keshi.”
brynne had already been in choir for two years where he exclusively sang falsetto, so the transition was natural. “I’d always sing with the girls, super high,” he said. When brynne’s choir director would separate the group into boys and girls, the director would look at brynne and say, “Except you. You can sing the soprano part because it’s more comfortable for you.”
In the winter of 2022, brynne got serious about making music. It wasn’t a joke anymore; he wasn’t trying to get the Try Guys attention, and crucially, his confidence had grown in his vocals. To mark this change, he bought a $10 microphone off Amazon (“the cheapest I could find,” he said) and on New Years Eve of 2020, recorded his first song with vocals, “origami”. He worked on the song all day, singing until 9 pm that night, three hours before the new year rang in 2021. “origami” became the first official song in his discography, and the first time brynne felt confident enough to finally own his artistry.
Over the next year, brynne worked up enough courage to hear his voice and not cringe. It helped, he said, when he met his producer stvphn, who showed him what autotune could do for his vocals. “ I didn’t like using autotune because I thought I had to learn how to sing without it,” he said, “but it made things so hard on me for no reason.” stvphn understood brynne’s vision for his music, and how experimental he can be. He also knew how brynne’s voice could be elevated with the right engineering and mixing. “stvphn showed me what my voice would be like if it were properly mixed,” brynne said. “He put me on upbeat electronic tracks and I thought, woah I could sound like that?! That’s crazy. I think that’s when I realized my natural voice can only get me so far. I realized I didn’t sound like other artists because they know how to process everything.”
By the beginning of 2023, brynne was beginning to get the hang of things. “I started off the new year strong: new year new me for real,” he said. The biggest change was his stage name, which he switched from “brin” to the actual spelling of his real name “brynne” (pronounced like “Bryan”). “I was so insecure about naming my product with my name. But then I got to a point where I was proud enough to say this is who I am and this is what I make,” he said.
brynne also began to innovate his sound. Gone were the low-fi beats created on GarageBand, replaced by a sound that could highlight his voice. He made a hyperpop track with Kai; he tried out R&B and pop, all of which showed an artist willing to try anything. “I think that really started to shine in 2023,” he said.
brynne has found the most freedom in being genre-less. What’s the point of sticking to one sound? All of his friends are making music that can’t be contained to one sound, and he finds inspiration from nearly every artist he comes across. “Also, I just find it boring. If I’m not changing my genre or trying something new, then I get bored of it and I stop writing,” he added. “It’s like, then I have nothing else to write about.”
brynne was inspired by Keshi again when he watched the singer’s documentary where he opened up about his nerves that fans may not like his new music. But then, Keshi explained, “real fans understand your sensibilities.” brynne felt he could take on the same attitude. “Real fans of my art are not listening for a specific sound, they’re listening to what I want to put out there.,” he said. “We make a product, put it together and hope that the fans trust us.”
brynne isn’t down for late nights. Though he is often on Discord nightly hanging out with friends or recording new music, by midnight he’s shut down. “I don’t see how my friends do all nighters,” he observed. “Once it’s 12 am and you ask me to sing something, I’m like, ‘I can’t do it anymore.’” This is partly because brynne probably has class the next day. He’s in college now, majoring in electrical engineering, something that surprises a lot of people when they first meet him. “I have a switch in my brain for creative time and not creative time,” he said. One night he might be making a new song, and the next day he’s figuring out how to build a circuit board.
The only time brynne’s stayed up late, for real, is when he shot a music video for “promise me you’ll be ok”. It was the first time brynne had shot a video and the idea was loose. He asked "NEXT WORLD" who’d be willing to shoot, and his friend Javi came through. “I didn’t know most people shoot videos in two days,” he said. They shot the video in one day. The footage, he said, was not great. Javi left for a trip to Indonesia the next day, so for the next two weeks, he and stvphn worked to salvage what they could. He learned how to use Final Cut and dove headfirst into editing.
At one point, he had an idea to shoot one more scene in the rain. It was almost impromptu after a workout with Kai. Kai shot the video on brynne’s phone. “I don’t do all nighters. I’ve never done an all-nighter. I don’t like to stay up after 12,” he said. “For the editing of this video, though, I had to stay up until 3 am and then still had to wake up for class at 9 am. Plus, I had to drive 20 minutes to class.”
The final video, which brynne released a few weeks ago, is one he’s proud of. He learned a lot too. Similar to how the first "NEXT WORLD" show taught brynne how to stage a show properly, his first video shoot taught him how to budget his time better, how to edit, and what kinds of shots he needs for a good video.
When I mentioned that brynne seems to be driven by experimentation, he paused. “When you said that, I wondered, ‘Do I really like trying new things?’ But actually, in almost every aspect of my life, I’m always trying something new whether it’s a different clothing style or taking a really weird class. I’m taking a “Traditional Music From Around the World” course, for example. It’s not something I’ll be using here in music.”
But it’s really brynne’s openness, his ability to share exactly what’s on his mind, and to do whatever feels right to him that is shaping his artistry. Interviews can be challenging because he might change his mind later, brynne said. He has so many stories he can share through his music. He paused, because stories are something that brynne tells best. “If you asked me the same question in fifteen minutes, I might have a completely different story for you,” he said. But really, it’s that angsty iPad kid in him that makes all of this possible.
“I mean, I was an iPad kid through and through. I’d play Minecraft every day. I’m on TikTok all the time,” he said. “I’m just an average teenager, but you know, maybe a little bit angstier than average.” The difference, he explained, is now he channels that angst into art. Now he can call on stvphn or "NEXT WORLD" with a simple request, “Let’s make that into music.”
