HARRY TEARDROP

Photographed by Blur Media

Harry Teardrop is an indie electronica-rock artist based in New York City. You might know him from his indie revival cover of “1234” by Plain White T’s, or his collaboration with the J-Rock group SATOH. His music is reminiscent of 2000s UK garage rock nostalgia and futuristic pop synths overlain across trap hi-hats. This year, he dropped “Black Converse,” a song that reminds us all of the joy that comes with yearning.  We asked Harry about his inspiration, if it’s artistically interesting to be alone, and if he would fuck, marry, or kill a pair of sneakers. Among other things…

Who is Harry, and why does he have a teardrop? 

Well, when I was in high school my brother showed me this song called “Frankie Teardrop” by Suicide. It’s really visceral - it’s just this droning song 10 minutes long and Alan Vega is screaming over the entire thing. I changed my Instagram handle to harryteardrop, before I’d dropped any music. If I’d have known then that I’d still be using that name all this time later, maybe I would’ve thought more about it. But that’s the way it goes. You just do what feels natural and keep rolling with it.

If your music was a person, what 3 articles of clothing would they wear? 

A good pair of jeans, because you always need a good pair of jeans. Black Converse, and then maybe a zip-up jacket… or a blazer. Or stripes. 

Ok, now play FMK with them.

Probably fuck the Converse. Kill the jacket. Marry the jeans. It’s socially acceptable to be shirtless, but not socially acceptable to be pantsless.

What is the way you see the world? 

As a chance for us to discover ourselves and each other.

The music videos and pictures you take are very personal. Familiar. It’s like living a distant memory in the present. 

I think it’s just what I like, naturally. I’m not sure. I never try to do things any certain way unless I’m referencing something specific, but most of the time I’m just making stuff and going with my intuition. In everything I do, I just like to make it feel personal. What would I want to watch, or what would I want to see? 

Do you feel like you’re a nostalgic person? 

I get that a lot. I think it’s because I still listen to music from the past, and really love music from the present, so it’s about trying to create something from a memory and make sense of it. It’s trying to create a memory that I’ll look back at later and remember this point of my life. 

Tell me about a time where it felt good to be in-between.

Honestly my whole life has been in-between. I don’t feel like I’m from anywhere in particular. I feel like I’ve never fully fit in anywhere. I oscillate between embracing that and feeling insecure about it. But I’m settling into embracing that nature of not knowing

I was born in New York, I lived in Portland, I lived in Shanghai, and then I lived in Orange County. And then back to New York. New York is definitely my bread and butter. Portland is moody, atmospheric. Shanghai is just crazy. It’s huge, futuristic, and rich, culturally. And then OC is just like…chill.

What does creation mean to you? 

Ever since I can remember, I have always been creating something. Writing poems about girls I liked, little homemade videos, because I just think it’s fun.

Would these girls get these poems? 

They probably would, and then they’d break up with me. But yeah, I’ve been more or less the same person, the whole time, just growing up into different stages of it. 

When you’re moving around and adjusting so much, you learn to be a fluid person. It feels like you’ve rebuilt yourself in a lot of ways.

Yeah, and it comes with destruction. I’m always destroying and rebuilding with every new song or idea. It gets to a point where I do feel like I’ve alienated people who were really into Chinatown [bedroom pop era], and I put out a digital punk song and they’re like, “What the fuck is this?”I don’t have any regrets about that. But at the same time, I do realize if I had committed to one sound more, it would have been easier to access.

There aren’t many Asian indie artists, so it’s cool to be part of that. I’m trying to kill the Keshi epidemic. Not kill it, but build upon it, I guess. We need some… We need some flavor. Asian-American music so far has been derivative of other things that exist. And it makes sense, because a lot of Asian people grow up listening to old R&B that their parents are into and it makes sense that that would build into whatever is happening right now. 

But at the same time, there’s a lot of Asian people who are into electronic, like 2hollis, and Beabadoobee. There are signs that Asian people are hungry for different forms of music, or subgenres. Just stuff that’s more against the grain. But there’s not a ton of support behind the artists who are trying to do that. Because it’s risky, you know? 

It’s like, you can either be Asian and make something that’s really accessible, or you can be white and make something underground. It’s hard to do both. 

What did you grow up on?

Mostly rock, specifically Pop rock. Blink-182 is a huge band for me, the Strokes, Phoenix, Oasis. I loved British music too, there’s a band called The Cribs. It wasn’t until high school that I started getting into rap music, and then I got really into electronic in college. But I’m an indie person at heart. I’ve embraced it. I take it and never look back. It’s a very sentimental form of music. That’s where I get a lot of the nostalgia from.

On pop punk revival…

The cool thing about people’s taste right now is that it’s so all over the place. People are into different things. Obviously there’s specific subgenres that people are into, the scenes. Like in New York, there’s a really big electronic scene, and emo / screamo adjacent stuff. I guess what I mean to say is because of playlist culture, people are really used to having a lot of different kinds of music on one playlist. People are more open-minded, musically, which is a good thing. But at the same time, people don’t really know what they like until you give it to them. So it’s up to the artist to take risks and try different shit and see if it sticks. That’s what I try to do. Remember that party we went to? 

You pulled up to that one alone, right? 

Yeah. I had some friends there, but mostly alone. I’m kind of a floater. I like going to events and just see. Just observe. I’m appreciating. A lot of people are pretty self-conscious these days, I think. Hyper-aware that they’re being perceived. I think people get caught up in those perceptions. But I like to just be me. I think my favorite people are unapologetically themselves, so I take inspiration from that. 

It’s hard not to think about how you’re perceived, I imagine, as an artist. 

Everybody is a fucking artist these days. I think that’s good and bad. The bad thing is that it’s really easy to compare yourself to other people. But I’ve been doing this for a long time now, so I’ve seen how things come and go, and how you really just have to do you. I’m really lucky that the fans I do have are really supportive and down for me to take my time making stuff, and experiment. What do they say? Oh yea, things are often chopped and… what is it? Oh, things are often chopped and cooked before they’re served and ate. 

Tell me about a piece of media that has stained you, for better or for worse. 

Fallen Angels by Wong Kar Wai, or Chungking Express. I’ve definitely outgrown it now, because I’m like 25. But when I was 18, I just felt so seen and understood. The themes are so depressing, real, just like that lack of connection. Yearning as a core emotion. 

What kind of stain do you want Harry Teardrop to make? 

 A scar. It’ll heal and fade away, but it’ll always remind you of a specific time. When you were young, dumb, and not afraid of risk.

Photographed by Blur Media

SIXSAIDIT DEBUT SHOW

On Friday, June 13th, SixSaidIt hosted her debut show at Make Out Music, supported by Ella Warren, Shelailai, Nebula, and Hu Dat.

All proceeds from the show went to The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.

thank you to everyone who came out, and we’ll see you at the next one xx

All photos by Amira Belhedi

SIXSAIDIT IS UP NEXT. SHE WON’T KEEP REPEATING IT FOR YOU.

Photographed by Rogue Bonaventura

There are very few realms that rapper and singer and performance artist SixSaidIt does not inhabit. When she steps, an hour and a half late, into the quiet, fluorescent domain of Outfitters Wig on Hollywood Boulevard on a grey Saturday afternoon in May, Six has already completed more tasks than many of her peers have faced in a month. She’s spent the last twenty four-hours working her day job as an ICU nurse; she woke up on this particular day and ran a couple of miles, then assembled a wardrobe, then washed and styled a wig for the shoot, then drove across Los Angeles to find parking for the hourslong endeavor. She’ll do her own makeup; suggest photo setups to the team; pose like she hasn’t spent the last week on her feet. Later, she’ll drive to Make Out Music to scope the space for her debut show on June 13th, for which she’s planned an intricate, involved performance that would hold its own in a stadium setting. Soon, she’ll release sweat-soaked single “Butta N Bread,” for fans waiting to grind, skin-to-skin, on a humid summer evening. For now, she sets down numerous heavy bags and heads straight for the makeup chair. 

“Sorry, I’m late,” she grins. “Things have been hectic. I’m happy to be here”

It is precisely this sort of boundarylessness—that between performance and selfhood, that between music and art, that between private and public—that renders SixSaidIt one of the most interesting new artists in the industry. Her work (that is, her music catalogue in addition to her creative direction) is constantly in flux: Six interrogates genre, weaving elements of drill with UK garage, classic pop, R&B, and American hip hop; she designs discrete worlds with each new project and single, and does so because, above all, SixSaidIt has a penchant for storytelling.

The artist, now six years, two albums, and several singles deep, had been a straight A student and a scholar, deeply entrenched in the medical field for several years and on track to be a doctor, before she was plucked from a crowd at Trap Karaoke in NYC to perform “Take Yo Man” by City Girls. “There was this, like, supernatural feeling that overtook me,” she describes of her entrance into performing experience. “It was a happiness I had never experienced before.” Six found her path in the industry because—to put it simply—performing made her feel glorious. “When I was a kid, I would pretend I was Beyoncé. I couldn’t sing like her, so I just had to figure out a way to be able to perform.” Hence: rap. Hence, the inflection point for a longstanding dedication to doing things Six’s way.

Six’s way? It’s a hybrid endeavor—her visual direction is largely influenced by drag and ballroom, specifically rupture of hegemony accomplished via stage performance. “I’m trying to get [into ballroom] because of this act of performance,” she shares. I feel a very close allyship to the LGBTQAI community. Even in being an immigrant, you know, and being Black and being a woman, right? I want to speak to all those parts of me in my music, and I want all those people who are parts of those communities to feel and understand me.” As can be evinced from her nearly religious pursuit of the self, Six holds multiple things to be true at once: she wants to be heard, understood, by fans from disparate parts of the globe, of the internet, of all communities. At the same time—she’s not confident that her own understanding of herself is a requisite to making good art.

“I spent all my life assimilating,” she tells me. The artist grew up between London and Nigeria, before moving to Atlanta for high school and then New York City for nursing school. She eventually landed in Los Angeles. “Those old habits start to creep back in, when everyone's telling you to find a niche and to find a sound, everyone's telling you to put yourself in a box. And, you know, that’s what I’ve done all my life. Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to make sense of something that's not meant to make sense, you know?” It’s a privilege to speak to Six today, as she stands on the cusp of success that feels nearly tangible, and well within her grasp. At present, the artist is navigating a situation that well established musicians yearn to return to—that liminal time in which she is introducing to her audience the presence that is—and will perhaps be cemented as—SixSaidIt. It’s a precarious position, largely because Six resists definition.

“There was a point a couple years back at which I had to make the decision that, ‘Hey, if I'm going to do this, I can't keep having to fit into other people's spaces and cultures and other people's expectation of how I'm supposed to be,’” she continues. “I am this unique entity that has these different backgrounds and cultural influences, and I want to share all of them [with my audience], so that if there is somebody else out there, like me who has like, that cultural intersectionality, they feel seen, you know, instead of like, having to constantly code switch.”

If there is a nucleus to Six’s boisterous work—which oscillates between styles and even accents (see her uptempo 2020 “Code Switch” where she rides beats with a British accent, compared with her sultry, lilting, and distinctly American purr on 2025 single “Margiela (More Jealous),” it is an unquestionable and nonpareil drive towards full-throated artistic actualization. When we speak of her sonic inspirations (afrobeats and dancehall artists from across the diaspora; Missy Elliot; Tyler the Creator), Six speaks of music as its inextricable from performance: she loves the sound of these artists, but she admires largely for the liberated ways in which they’ve conducted their journey through the industry.  

SixSaidIt has entered into the music industry with the shape of her future clutched like clay in her palm. It is a meticulous business, presenting yourself as a musician—a person—for the world to consume, but Six has, above all, a power that she alone is in charge of wielding. Months from now, or a year, or ten—however long it may take, Six will undoubtedly be sat atop success reaped from years of laborious sowing and careful planning—but she knows, even now, that this won’t be enough. That’s why SixSaidIt is so special. She’ll be a success. She’ll have laurels, and she’ll have a discography, and she’ll have multitude of fans, but she will look at herself and say: “We’re still not there. We’re still not there. There’s more, there’s more, there’s more.”

Buy tickets to SixSaidIt’s debut show here.