NoSo’s debut album ‘Stay Proud Of Me’ marks a tectonic shift in LA based Abby Hwong’s creative career, standing bold and gentle amidst its tender confessions, nuanced desires, and musings of rebirth.
‘Parasites’ opens the LP with booming drums and sun-soaked synths, scoring the powerful tale of metamorphosis that found Hwong throughout gender-affirming surgery. Evocative strings and muted piano drift in tandem underneath NoSo’s compelling vocal quality, the instrumental patterns lifting their voice as it rings out with a comforting clarity. Often directly and indirectly touching on the nuances of their nonbinary identity and Korean heritage, NoSo now graciously takes us with them in their musical time machine, exploring their childhood home, their dreams, fears and queer longings, creating picture perfect moments through this driftingly hypnagogic soundtrack.
Hwong’s talent lies not only in music-making but in creating vivid, cinematic images with their lyricism and instrumentation, no doubt aided by their love of screenwriting. Teaching themself production in lockdown also honed this ability to sculpt autonomous sonic landscapes and their progression can be heard in the marriage of bedroom pop beats with high-res production which they use to bring us into their world.
We watch this play out in standout single ‘Suburbia’, Hwong’s soft stacked vocals lying soft on clean guitar and cloud like synths that make for an addictive melody. Thrillingly immersive, the song chronicles a complicated relationship within the quiet suburban life in which Hwong was raised, managing to capture the monotony of suburbia while still clouded in a hesitant nostalgia. “Stay the same without me…” Hwong sighs across the synths.
Drawing from a myriad of musical styles, the album drifts from St. Vincent-like gritty electro beats on ‘Honey Understand’ to the gentle guitar arpeggios that permeate ‘I Feel You’, later exploding into a Mitski style 80’s synth break, tangled guitar emitting an urgent rhythm.
References to queerness throughout the album are intimate and truthful, digging through the bones of Hwong’s struggle for acceptance both from themself, their partners and from the world around them. ‘David’ shines a spotlight on the intersectional nature of race and gender, detailing a dream where Hwong walked through the world as a white cis man and watched how differently they were treated.
‘Feeling Like A Woman Lately’ again wrestles with the impossibility to quantify gender. “I was once a pretty girl too”; an exclamation that carries such weight echoes out casually over jangling guitar.
Closing track ‘Everything I’ve Got’ seeks to encapsulate NoSo’s growth both as a person and as an artist. The lyrical intimacy that we feel NoSo will become known for reverberates softly and the usual instrumentation is joined by a larger than life orchestral swell, the strings and trumpets carrying us up to the highest peak on this emotional rollercoaster.
NoSo takes a somewhat tentative step into the light with ‘Stay Proud Of Me’, clasping maybe too hard to humility considering the width of their creative prowess. Joining the likes of Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus in their stark emotional realism, NoSo brings their intensely poignant perspectives and bravely lays them bare.
7/10
Words: Oshen Douglas McCormick
