Rising R&B artist and rapper Audrey Nuna released her new single Blossom earlier this week. When discussing the new track, the 22-year-old said, “Blossom is a song about growing up. My grandma recently told me about her childhood and how she had to flee a war by foot. I’m happy I was able to put her voice in the outro.” The artist further announced a larger body of work on the way, called a liquid breakfast, which features 10 original tracks, including critically acclaimed Comic Sans, damn Right, Space, and her latest – Blossom. The album will release via Arista Records on May 21.
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“a liquid breakfast is a project about being a loner and the liberation that it came with for me,” Nuna said. “It’s my journal from the last year and a half. There’s a lot of different sounds and sides of myself I’ve captured and collected over the months I was driving around the suburbs of Jersey. A lot of this project was written in a car or against the smell of birthday cake candles and food cooking in the room over.”
Also released was the artist’s VEVO DSCVR live performances of Space and Blossom, which showcase Nuna’s skills as an enigmatic performer, vocalist, rapper, and lyricist.
Nuna grew up in New Jersey as a first-generation Korean-American who sang before she could talk. While hanging her hat on the value of work, she embraces the responsibility of representing Korean Americans and women in pop music. “My identity as a Korean American is an important part of who I am, and it’s going to leak into whatever I make regardless so it’s not something I need to consistently remind people. Normalizing that energy and that culture is really what’s important to me. For the first time, push a face like mine into the mainstream, but do that while never compromising my creativity. Always remembering to push boundaries creatively – that comes first for me – and it’s the right time for it,” she said.
She has come a long way since she began voice lessons in elementary school and scoring her first gig singing America The Beautiful during the U.S. Open Tennis Tournament at age 10, having been accepted to the Clive Davis Institute and enrolled in New York University, where she would “take the 10 p.m. train uptown to Anwar’s studio, write all night, take the 4 a.m. bus back to NYU, grab a few hours of sleep, and go to class.” Soon after, she decided to take a gap year to focus on her music, to which she says “I don’t like the feeling of half-assing anything.”
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Once she released a series of six tracks, she landed a record deal with Arista Records under Sony Music Entertainment, where she made her major-label debut with Time (2019), followed by the releases of Paper, Comic Sans ft. Jack Harlow, Long Night, and damn Right. Nuna has received worldwide critical praise on her handful of releases to date, including Vogue, who featured the artist in their January issue, saying “damn Right quickly hit a nerve,” while NPR featured her in their list of women in rap who left their mark on 2020, saying she was “one to watch this year.”
