brynne Wasn’t Supposed To Make This Album

For months, brynne has been working on a project that has a strikingly independent and experimental sound. But is he ready to release a debut album into the world?

Photos in this story are by Emily T.

It was only five days into the new year when brynne assembled a skeleton crew of guys who would become the creative core of his debut album. In his bedroom and over discord, the friends came together to talk about the creative process over the next week. The group he formed included his longtime producer stvphn and Eruma, a photographer and videographer, who was staying with brynne for the next week. On the business side, Kai Caden, the CEO of NEXT WORLD, would serve as an unofficial manager (something he contested as recently as this week at the album release party). Xander Fernandez, a director, would later be pulled in to film an album trailer and the music video for “composure”. 

Though he’s a soloist, brynne has never worked fully independently. He frequently pulls in members of NEXT WORLD, which he is President of, or key collaborators to help him formulate a vision. 

The friends brynne assembled for this project resemble him in key ways: They’re scrappy, ambitious artists, all in their twenties, who are spread out through the southern California area. Like brynne, they’re quick witted and don’t take the work too seriously. Yet they’re also willing to go to extremes to get the work done and operate with an eagerness to experiment. 

For the past five weeks, stvphn told me, he had done nothing but produce for brynne. Progress was being made daily. The night before, they completed a dreamy pop track called “epistaxis”. (Eruma would direct the music video.) But perhaps most important was that this was the first meeting to mark an official album campaign.

“The whole process of recording ‘DRAMA’.”, stvphn said, referencing HOHYUN’s debut album, “ prepared me for tackling a whole other album – which wasn’t supposed to happen.”

“We didn’t want it to be one!” brynne interjected with a raised voice, which he is prone to doing when stvphn starts talking. 

And though this was the album that should have never existed, they were locked into a grueling content schedule. They would be everywhere for the next seven days - at the beach, in rented studio spaces, at home, driving around Los Angeles and through the Valley. brynne is not someone who likes to stay up past his self-appointed bedtime of midnight (a boy’s gotta sleep for his electrical engineering classes), but he was committed to going hard for this week. 

Eruma would be new to this grind with brynne and stvphn. “This guy, Michael,” stvphn said, looking at Eruma, “he’s about to go through the fucking gutter.” 

Xander and Eruma were new additions to the team. “I really thought you were booked like every fucking day,” brynne said at one point to Eruma, who was laying on brynne’s bed. “That’s why I was scared to ask you to do this project.” 

But Eruma liked the music brynne was making and he had a vision for what they could accomplish together. What he was most concerned about was the quality of his work. “I’m worried about having it be consistently good,” Eruma admitted at one point. “Especially because I haven’t worked on a full album rollout.” 

But neither had any of the guys in the room. The creative process for “all the words i could’ve said” was going to be as naturally freewheeling and free-spirited as brynne. 

This was, perhaps, the point. No one knew what the fuck they were doing. That’s what made it exciting. 

Even though it might seem required for a musician, brynne isn’t the most comfortable talking about himself. This might surprise you if you know brynne. His social battery almost always seems turned on. He can yap for hours about some of his favorite memories from producing NEXTWORLD shows with Kai or how certain, older artists intimidate him. On our calls, he often shows me videos and photos from his week or talks about how school has kicked his ass. But opening up about his feelings is another, more difficult matter. 

stvphn saw this firsthand when they began mixing his single “why do i still see u?”. That song was about a traumatic breakup, one that brynne never told anyone the specifics about for almost an entire year. “I felt like I couldn't open up to anyone about it,” he explained to me and stvphn one night last spring. “What if it got back to my ex?” 

Nearly a year later, brynne had just begun to process how little he had shared. “It’s so ironic,” he said to stvphn with a self-conscious laugh as they prepared for the upcoming shoots, “because you were already mixing the songs and you heard over and over how much I hate them but you never understood what happened.” 

stvphn believes his job as an executive producer is to bring these messy, complicated feelings to the forefront of the album. “I think it’s cool that he’s in a spot where he can express things about himself,” stvphn reflected to me later. “I think there’s a lot of substance now because he’s talking so much about himself and his experiences. While he’s in this mindset, I just want to crank out as many songs as we can and then we will format it into the project.” 

The album really began to grow its teeth as stvphn pushed brynne to express himself more. “He could be at a comfortable point but I said, ‘brynne, if you wanna be ambitious, I feel like you haven’t said everything you wanted to say,” stvphn recalled telling him one night. 

“That was the line,” brynne surmised, “that turned this from an EP into an album.” 

stvphn started to push brynne to dig deeper and be a little more vulnerable. One night, for instance, he asked brynne what scared him. As brynne began to talk, stvphn secretly recorded him and that dialogue became the opening track “fear”. 

“I think there’s a lot of trust between us. It’s rare as a producer to find someone who you get along with so well. A lot of this is in brynne’s control, but also in my control because it has to cohesively sound the same with the mixing and mastering,” stvphn explained to me midway through the album’s production. “I am grateful to brynne that he trusts me to this extent. These are his songs and feelings, but it’s my responsibility to gather those songs and put them into a tangible thing for people to listen to.” 

Before making this album and meeting stvphn, brynne rarely talked about his feelings. But during his first year of college, as he processed a shitty breakup and self-esteem issues, he began to write letters to himself, which he would then fold into paper cranes. 

“I folded a crane every single day,” he remembered,” and I wrote everything I was feeling in every single crane.”

For the “epistaxis” video, he planned to burn them.

Some of his friends, like Kai, didn’t understand why he’d want to burn the letters. “They’re an important part of his history”, Kai argued. But brynne was ambivalent about the cranes. Burning them was almost a ritual for him. “I don’t know what else I’d do with them,” he remembered telling Kai. “They’re just a bunch of sad letters.” 

“I’m very adamant about burning them. This album is truly about letting go of it all,” he explained to me. 

“If I really wanna let go of it all," he continued, “then I just need to get rid of the letters.” 

The wildfires that destroyed the Palisades and much of rural Los Angeles also pushed Eruma back home long before they had finished any of their planned shoots. A week after the first official album meeting, brynne celebrated his twentieth birthday. He was safe from the wildfires that were burning not far away in the mountains, albeit he was celebrating with a smaller group of friends than planned.

It would all have felt ominous had brynne not been so used to averting disaster. Nearly every project he’s worked on has encountered some sort of unexpected snag. The album’s first round of shots going up in smoke was almost expected. 

For the second try, Xander was enlisted to shoot the album trailer at Newport Beach. When I heard from brynne a few days later, he told me how this shoot, too, had unexpected hiccups that began with the group wading through a tunnel of freezing cold water to get to the beach. 

“There’s this photo of us,” brynne told me as he recounted the story and pulled up a photo of the guys in the tunnel. “We can only make one trip. So I decided to carry everything. I had my Docs on and I had to remove my Docs before I walked through and that made things a lot worse.” 

Things were no better for Kai, who somehow was always roped into brynne’s craziest ideas. “Kai’s feet almost became frozen.” Kai spent the next few hours glued to a heater. “It was really bad.”

As the day went on, the group working on the shoot grew larger. Emily, a photographer, joined and ate all of brynne’s snacks. Near the end of the shoot, Logan, brynne’s film photographer, and stvphn arrived. 

As they made their way through the tunnel brynne heard stvphn shout, “Yo, this shit cold as hell!” brynne tried to tell them that it wasn’t worth coming through the tunnel but stvphn was stubborn. “We paid $12 for parking,” stvphn retorted, “we’re going to make this worth it.” 

After the shoot, the group aborted plans for pizza (the restaurant was too crowded) and instead opted for a Taco Bell a little farther north. “We were right by Seaside,” brynne said, referencing the infamous bakery on Newport Beach that has gone viral on Asian American TikTok. “I think you know where this is going.” 

But this is also where the story comes into its sharpest focus, because at its core the making of “all the words i could’ve said” is one about friendship. 

Near Seaside, brynne got cookies (“they were so good”) and the green thai tea that everyone talks about (“shit’s so good”). He also filmed several TikToks outside, like everyone does, “for the memes”. Later, he ran into two friends who were celebrating birthdays because, even though it’s Los Angeles, the Asian American scene is remarkably small. It’s perhaps tiny at a viral destination like Seaside. 

That night, brynne didn’t go to bed until 4 am. It would have been earlier, he countered to me, had he not taken a shower. But he thought of the clean sheets his mom had put on his bed and the disgusting tunnel he had to wade through to get to the beach. 

“I was not about to get into bed without cleaning off after getting in that water.”

The next day, in a move that was almost out of character, he took an extraordinarily luxurious and well-deserved three hour nap. 

This was never supposed to be an album, brynne told me multiple times over the past three months. “I didn’t mean to do this,” he’d often say. “I didn’t mean to make any of this.” 

But the pace in which it came together – and the amazing team he assembled around him, convinced brynne to follow his instincts and keep going. 

“I never formally asked them to do any of this,” he said of Eruma, Xander and stvphn. But they stuck around and for the past three months, the guys have been instrumental in creating the dreamy world that “all the words i could’ve said” inhabits. 

brynne worked on the album as he pulled in long hours at school, sometimes writing lyrics on the back of his electrical engineering homework. “You can see all of the places I scratched out words or put the bridge,” he told me of the lyrics he wrote for “i’ll figure it out”. 

As spring break approached, brynne was exhausted but satisfied with how the album was coming along. His one regret, he said, was maybe that he burned all the paper cranes. “I wish I had kept one of the cranes,” he told me. Then caught himself, “But no, burn them all.”

brynne admitted that he’s spent a lot of time thinking about what he wants from music. What is the point of doing this? He's thought about the question more than a few times. A career in engineering, he reasoned, will almost surely be more profitable and secure. 

“I don’t want to be desperate about whether I can provide,” he said to me one night when he was in a reflective mood. “I thought about becoming an engineer for at least 15 years. I’ve wanted to do this since I was five.”

brynne is often balancing a massive amount of homework with mixing or songwriting. “The sacrifice is not getting much sleep,” he said wryly.

 For Pluto Koi, who is also juggling college with a music career, brynne’s drive is inspiring. “It’s crazy you say that he looks up to me cause I feel like it's definitely the other way around,” he said to me and laughed. “I’m so excited for his album to come out. Everything so far has been a banger and I can't wait to see how his music journey will take off from here.” 

Despite the time constraints and the lack of sleep, the music had come together in a beautiful way. With the help of stvphn, brynne had succeeded in writing brave, honest lyrics. On tracks like “savior” he puts himself first and rejects love, while on “idontbelonghere” he writes about how wounding relationships are. For the lead single “hometown”, he writes about how scary it is to grow up and be defined by your past. Throughout it all, at twenty, brynne is trying to figure out his own place in the world. 

When it came time to lay down lyrics and vocals on the final track, “i’ll figure it out”, the process was surprisingly effortless. stvphn always envisioned the closing track continuing the unfinished thoughts brynne began on “fear”. So they chopped up the recordings of brynne talking about his fears and put the second half at the end of the record to bookend the album. 

“I think that’s the beauty of this album: It sounds so sonically different but there’s pieces of brynne and me that gives it the signature sound,” he told me in January. “To add that cherry on top, we have the spoken word intro and the end to tie it all together.”

On one of our last calls before the album was sent to distribution, brynne showed me a video of him figuring out the chords and lyrics for “i’ll figure it out”. In the video, he sits in his room as he strums the guitar and begins to hum the chorus. Slowly, he gained confidence in the sound and then he began to sing: “I never thought when I was 16 I’d make it this far/ I thought that they’d leave/ It’s just what I’m used to.” 

Those lyrics didn’t make the final cut, but that is when brynne knew he had something.

For a moment I watched as a look of certainty flashed across his face. Musicians wait for moments like this, when ideas and creativity converge into something magical. Perhaps the pain over the past two years was worth it; maybe the feelings that he could never measure up led him to this moment as he put his deepest thoughts into music. Maybe when he looks back on this album in five or ten years, he’ll see it as the first time he really owned his identity and feelings. 

But for now, it was just brynne, alone in his room, finding the chords to make his pain into useful art. When he finished, he sent the demo to stvphn. 

They had an album.