Kai Caden and Brynne Are Bringing NEXT WORLD Everywhere

The collective’s mission is to empower and train artists. As a result, they’ve built one of the strongest artist-led communities in music.

Buy tickets to NEXT WORLD’s biggest showcase yet at The Paramount in Los Angeles on June 23rd

 The way Kai Caden and Brynne remember it, NEXT WORLD was started as an excuse for friendship. 

“It was peak Covid times,” Brynne recounted to me when we met a few months ago, “and I’m doing Zoom calls for classes and somehow I ended up meeting Kai.” Originally, the boys were introduced because of their shared interest in music. Brynne, who had spent his teen years singing in choir, had just begun recording demos. He was intrigued by Kai, who plays saxophone and would later move on to play for his college’s jazz band. Kai’s biggest asset, though, was in how to build a network of friends. ”It wasn’t gonna be a crazy big thing, it was just an excuse to hang out,” Brynne said.

But quickly, the guys began to formulate official plans. Kai became CEO, while Brynne assumed the role of President. Their official meeting grounds became Discord, a social platform for messaging and video calls. And they slowly started to recruit members. Eventually, the group grew big enough – and their ambitions became large enough – that Kai proposed the idea of staging their first music showcase. 

“You’re crazy,” Brynne told Kai after he heard the idea. “We’re about to be in college and we have no money.” 

But Kai, who is sharp witted and always determined to push his ideas through, didn’t flinch. “Yeah,” he replied. “I know.”

The collective, which became known as NEXT WORLD, held their first concert a few months later. 

“We’re only 19. Our ‘why’ is that we enjoy doing this,” CEO Kai Caden says.

It didn’t matter that the guys had never staged a show in their life or that they knew no one in the industry. It also didn’t matter that they hadn’t even taken a college course. What did matter – and what would eventually set the pair apart – is that they worked like hell to put their friends on stage. 

Today, Brynne and Kai are similar to curators who pull together an eclectic mix of artists for audiences to discover. Co-led with Vice President Alyssa Aquino, their roster is young, diverse and spread out across the globe. The collective, which currently includes around over 50 members, including staff, artists and musicians, are everywhere: Colorado, New York, Sacramento, LA – even in foreign countries. Their artists are never boxed in by genres or confined by roles. “We do whatever we want which brings us together,” Kai said.

They cover every form of entertainment and media from graphic designers to guitarists to drummers to traditional singers. Sometimes they meet up in the LA suburbs at boba tea shops or at In-n-Out, but most often you can find them on Discord, where the members share project ideas, organize shows and hang out. “It’s not just a company,” Brynne said. “It truly is just a group of best friends trying to hang out.” 

For Aquino, who oversees venue logistics, audience/ staff accommodations and advertising, NEXT WORLD provides the best opportunity to collaborate with artists she admires. “Next World gives me an opportunity to express and create with my creativity,” she said. “It is an outlet in my life that creates a spark like no other place has. It most importantly provides connections within and beyond my community.”

“We’re only 19,” Kai told me. “Our ‘why’ is because we enjoy what we’re doing.” But the collective has accomplished a lot.” In the past year, they’ve held four showcases and hosted several pop up events where members can play in informal settings. In the meantime, Kai and Brynne are around to offer support on everything from artist branding to stage presence. “A lot of people can’t figure out how to retain an audience,” Kai said. “NEXT WORLD is giving them the bigger hands to hold their audiences and teach them how to get to the next level (to) then understand how to control it.”

But as I learned over the months since I first met Brynne and Kai, what NEXT WORLD does best is provide a community. 

The main objective of NEXT WORLD is to provide a space for artists with a small amount of experience to hone their skills. This is also what sets the collective apart. While many collectives focus on building a base of talented artists with high social media numbers or a large amount of hype, Brynne and Kai’s goal is to build artists from the ground up. “We want to give people who have never performed before, no matter how many Spotify listeners they have, the opportunity to perform,” Kai explained. 

“There’s no formal way to join,” Brynne told me one night. “There’s no sign up sheet for how to get into NEXT WORLD.” Instead, Brynne and Kai prefer to have the prospective member hang out with them. Maybe they go get boba or sing karaoke one night if the prospective member lives in Los Angeles. If the member lives in another state, they could always virtually join the guys for video games or a hang out on Discord. 

Sometimes they might ask random questions. Kai’s been known to ask, “What’s your favorite Capri Sun flavor?” because it usually breaks the tension and makes them laugh. “The biggest thing is that it’s a bunch of friends,” Kai added. “We’re not very exclusive about who is in it. If we vibe with you, then we vibe with you.” 

What brings the most fulfillment to Brynne and Kai is seeing the artist they’ve welcomed start to take off. They might have a viral moment (which the members call “The NEXT WORLD Effect”) or they might begin to grow confident about their skills as a musician or performer. Whatever it is, once the member finds their artistic voice, then NEXT WORLD has done their job. 

“We’ll meet a person who wants to be an artist and, it’s like, give it a few months or a few weeks for people to find their music. We do small events to foster community and surround people with a community,” Brynne explained. “We give people a chance to have intimate experiences because a concert is a product. It’s us showing NEXT WORLD’s product.” 

If the artist isn’t comfortable performing on a big stage yet, they can always join for a jam night. “These small events let artists take the small steps,” Brynne added. 

For Mica Yui, a musician based across the country who will release a new album soon, the opportunity to join NEXT WORLD came at a pivotal moment in his career. “I started out alone and then I was picked up by a company and they just sucked everything out of me,” he said. But NEXT WORLD made him feel like he could navigate the industry and it provided him a guardrail. He had friends who he could go to for help or with questions about music. Suddenly, he wasn’t doing everything by himself. “That changed everything,” he said. 

As the membership has grown, so has an emphasis on clear communication. The members pride themselves on being able to have honest conversations with one another and on being able to give truthful feedback. 

Kurt Matthews, a drummer, remembered one night when several members played a game where they shared how they honestly felt about one another. “Having that conversation just gave me an idea of how important our community is,” he said. “Sometimes when we have tough conversations, we tend to discover new things in each other. Sometimes it’s not just the music. It’s your whole life. Sometimes how you do music is how you do your whole life and the things you do have truths in them.”

Alyssa Cheung, a singer from Hong Kong now based in LA, agreed with Kurt. “ We function really well as a group because we can communicate openly about what we appreciate in each other and what we gotta improve,” she said. Cat, a friend of NEXT WORLD, found that she has been able to speak her mind more since joining NEXT WORLD. “I trust these people with my life, and they give me really good advice,” she said. “I think I was able to become a bit stronger mentally and give more of myself in my everyday aspects of life.”

In Brynne’s view, the community supports one another in challenging each other to create better art or to become better people. “The entire community is pushing me in the same way they’d push each other,” he said. “It’s all the same exact support. Even though we’re all separate in our own artistry from designers to musicians to singers, we’re all supporting each other.

Kai echoed this in how he sees NEXT WORLD benefitting artists. “What makes us unique and what we pride ourselves with is the ability to support each other with no bias,” he said. “People may not always like each other but that doesn’t stop the vision.” 

Brynne and Kai both feel that they can teach the members through their own experiences with trial and error. “Kai and I have been in this field for three years now. There’s so many things that we’ve learned individually: dealing with distributors, dealing with playlists. These are lessons you can only learn from someone else who's been through it or who's gone through it themselves,” he said. “I will go through the mistakes  for them. I get to do all of these cool things but I also get to make sure others don’t have to make the same mistakes and bad decisions I did. I will go through it for them.” 

Collective members performing at a jam session.

“I don’t know why people like us,” Kai wondered aloud to me once. Building a company like this of so many diverse people across the world still felt unbelievable to him and Brynne. There is less swagger with Brynne and Kai than you’d expect to find from two leaders of a music collective. Instead, they’re extremely thoughtful, often self-deprecating guys who are more concerned with how you’re doing than worried about themselves. Perhaps this is why what surprises them most is how impactful they had been on the members' lives. 

“I don’t think it can be said enough,” Mica Yui told me, “the biggest thing about NEXT WORLD is the community. It’s the people in it. It’s not the music, as much as we want it to be. It’s not what we produce. It’s our own circle. I don’t think NEXT WORLD would be the same without the community.” 

For many members of NEXT WORLD, the community is the first time they’ve felt like they belonged anywhere. Over the time I spent talking to members, each person told me how much these friendships have impacted their lives. They’ve grown more comfortable being honest or sharing their thoughts. They’ve made friends who genuinely care about them. Perhaps most importantly, they feel supported; as if, for once, they're not alone. 

“I am involved with NEXT WORLD because it not only makes me grow with my friends, but because it is fun to create a place for artists/creatives to grow as well,” Aquino explained. “In all honesty, I would never say I am doing this for money because at the end of the day I am paid with memories and lessons I would not get elsewhere.”

“I honestly feel like with the entire Next World community I've been able to try and be more social, outgoing, and extroverted without being embarrassed or anything,” Michael Dy, a crazy talented guitarist, bassist, and drummer, told me. “This entire community of musicians/people has been a huge blessing to be a part of because I'm able to not only do what I love through performing but also be more of myself.”

NEXT WORLD President Brynne, CEO Kai Caden and Vice President Alyssa Aquino.

These feelings were felt most acutely by Alyssa. Finding NEXT WORLD “fresh off the boat”, she said with a laugh, made America feel like home. “Before I met NEXT WORLD I was all alone. I was new here and I didn’t have any friends,” she said. At school, she only had two to three friends. It was a lonely, strange time. Then she joined the collective. “It's something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. I feel like I found my life here. I feel like I belong here and I wanna continue my dreams here.”

Alyssa even met her boyfriend, Owen Santos, in NEXT WORLD. (Although Brynne is quick to assert, “NEXT WORLD is not Hinge.”) Owen remembers how introverted he used to be before joining the collective. But then, he blossomed and fell in love. “Now we’re coming up on a year together,” he said. “I never knew I could be in such an insanely healthy relationship.”

Often when I spoke to the members of NEXT WORLD, they would reflect on some of the funniest moments together. “Remember that time Mario stood on a table at In-n-Out one night after a show and took twenty minutes to tell a joke?” That story comes up a lot and sometimes Brynne and Kai laugh so hard they can barely tell it. (They have video evidence, in case you want to see it.)  The nights they’d spend at Brynne’s house looking for venues or letting Kai be a chiropractor. (“I’m the group’s chiropractor,” he advised me.) The nights they got food together at midnight or the time that, as Logan Fong described, “an environmental nightmare” rolled through and threatened to upend their show. “I think that the fact that we persevered and adapted to the trials we experienced is really the core memory I have of that night and NEXT WORLD as a whole,” Logan remembered. “Those were the most chaotic moments ever,” Kai added. “But as the night went on and as we started to do music and have fun, the rain died down but the energy went up as we celebrated independent artistry.”

“I’m not able to forget Next World concerts,” Kai reminisced. “I’ve learned a valuable lesson and made a great memory at each concert.” 

Threaded throughout each memory is a group of friends who would have never met without this collective. Without NEXT WORLD, several members told me, they wouldn’t be where they are now as musicians or as people: confident, happy, belonging somewhere. 

Steven, who produces music for Brynne and is also a solo artist, was perhaps the most reflective on the collective. “I don’t have a core memory. I think of memories as little moments that get stitched together. I think of it as anytime I’ve hung out with these guys or had any interaction anyone could talk about any moment and I’d remember it. I could tell you the first time I met Brynne, Kai, Alyssa, Logan, or Kurt,” he said. “I could tell you the whole process of making songs together or any of the live shows or just getting food with them. I think that’s the greatest thing. There hasn’t been a moment that’s one core memory because there’s so many small moments that get added together to create this full memory.” 

Collective members performing at a showcase.

There’s a YouTube short I love from a NEXT WORLD event where a member takes us, the viewer, along to a jam session. The event, held at a boba shop, felt more like a hang than a quote-unquote music event. But what stuck out to me the most as I watched the reel is the warmth of NEXT WORLD members. “POV: You attend a NEXT WORLD event” the caption reads and for a moment, you feel as if you’ve been welcomed into the coolest friend group possible. There is a comfort in being around others who believe in you, who support you and see you for who you really are, and these members do just that. Whether at jam sessions or in concert halls, NEXT WORLD is there for you. 

Sometimes we don’t tell our friends how much we appreciate them. Often we believe that our actions say the words that don’t get spoken. The night I interviewed several members of NEXT WORLD, I watched as Brynne and Kai sat with near-stunned looks on their faces. 

As member after member shared their testimony about how NEXT WORLD didn’t just make them grow as musicians but as people too, the guys grew more emotional. Steven was perhaps most contemplative of his time in the collective, something that surprised Brynne. “Steven rarely says so many nice things,” he told me later with a laugh. But Steven was adamant: NEXT WORLD will change your life. 

“Getting older I cherish and value time,” Steven told me. “Anytime I see these guys it’s great to pick up where we left off. The best part is just hanging out.” 

After meeting the members, Kai asked if I had time to talk with him and Brynne more. They wanted to recap what they had just heard, which was the first time many of the members had been so explicit about the impact of the collective. 

“I had no idea anyone felt that way,” Kai said, with a mixture of shock and amazement in his voice. For Brynne, who spent years alone in his room making music before meeting Steven and Kai, the amount of love directed towards them was almost too much to take in. “I almost cut off my camera,” he said, “because I was about to cry.” His voice grew shaky as he recalled the members who talked about how depressed they were before NEXT WORLD; how they felt alone and displaced in their daily lives but in this community they felt cared for and part of something important. 

“I don’t think we deserve this. What we have is so rare,” Brynne said softly as he thought about how many friends they’d been given. “And I feel so lucky to be surrounded by such talented and great people.”

Kai thought about it for a moment. ““We know that it's not gonna be like this forever because the community is gonna get larger,” he said, “but we started this with genuine friendship. The same way that NEXT WORLD has impacted our members is the same impact they’ve had on my life.”

The NEXT WORLD fam