Towa Bird
Six years after first becoming a TikTok guitar hero, Towa Bird is leaning into every side of herself on second album ‘Gentleman’. We meet a star finding power in the grey areas.
Words: Lisa Wright. Photos: Katie Stratton.
Sat at the top of the YouTube comments, with a thousand shiny thumbs ups signalling their agreement, there’s a hot take on the video for Towa Bird’s most recent single ‘Dog’ and its depiction of lusty, uninhibited lesbian sex that feels particularly pertinent: “Now this is gonna be someone’s gay awakening”.
“It’s so cool if I can be, because there are so many artists who helped me become comfortable in myself,” grins the singer, casual in a grey jumper, glasses and customary curls as she calls in from her adopted home of Los Angeles. “I owe those artists so much, so if I can be even a tiny smidgen of that to anybody, then I’m doing my job well.”
In the scene, Bird wears a white vest and arse-less chaps, crawling on all fours as the sub to Love Lies Bleeding actor Katy O’Brian’s leather-clad dom. It’s impossibly sexy but also confident and clearly made for the queer and female gaze. Bird might have – understandably – steered clear of showing her parents her latest work (“I was just like, ‘You can probably give this one a miss if you want…’” she laughs), but to her wider community, the depiction is important.
“It’s so cool to see queerness and lesbians represented in this specific way,” she nods. “In terms of how I feel in my own internal life, it didn’t feel risqué or controversial. But me writing songs about lesbian sex and being quite sexual is active resistance against the patriarchy, against homophobia, against misogyny and the way that men see queerness and women and people who are non-men. I have to remember that sometimes.”
Me writing songs about lesbian sex is active resistance against homophobia, against the patriarchy. I have to remember that sometimes.
Towa Bird
Since breaking through during the pandemic via a series of viral guitar covers, the now-27-year-old Bird has been steadily cementing an identity that refuses easy pigeonholing. Born in Hong Kong to a British father and Filipino mother, she moved around as a youth, living variously in Thailand and the UK before moving to America nearly five years ago. Last month, she released second album ‘Gentleman’. On its cover, Bird plays two suit-clad versions of herself – one, slicked back and pouty; the other softer, stronger and with a corsage pinned to their lapel. The concept of ‘Gentleman’ – of expressing the dualities of yourself with confidence – became a “north star” for the record, a fusion of unashamed guitar virtuosity and insatiable pop hooks that lands as her boldest output yet.
The artists she’s always looked up to are people who’ve similarly carved out and claimed their own space. She lists Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre’s Kathleen Hanna, David Bowie and Prince as her original icons: people who defied boundaries whether in style, sexuality or race, and gave a young Bird the idea that she too could exist happily in “the grey areas”.
“Growing up as someone who struggled with labels – being mixed, being queer, being very androgynous – I loved that they weren’t adhering to the binaries of everything. It didn’t necessarily matter how they identified, they were so whole,” she considers. “When you’re growing up you’re either female or male, either white or not white. You have to fit into the categories, and I didn’t. But they didn’t fit into the categories either, they were just doing their thing. I was like, ‘Oh, you can be a person with depth. You can just be who you are’. That was really cool.”
Since moving to LA, where she lives with her partner, singer Reneé Rapp, Bird has found that the culture has imbued her with the increased “permission to be loud” that rings out through ‘Gentleman’. Moving around a lot in her formative years skewed her understanding of her place in the world. “In Hong Kong, I grew up around a lot of people who were also mixed or came from a third culture background, whereas when I moved to the UK I found myself just pretty much around English people so my context changed quite a lot,” she explains. “Before, I was just a kid and didn’t think of myself as anything else but that. And then when I moved to the UK, I was like, ‘Oh, I’m the minority. Things have changed. This is now different.’”
Conversely, Rapp has previously nicknamed her and Bird’s current home the “lesbian frat house” – an open-door space for the community of queer friends that Bird happily celebrates as her “chosen family”. Chatting about the joy of these friendships is what bonded the singer with her aforementioned hero Kathleen Hannah, who helped co-write and added guest vocals to the fizzing dance-punk of ‘All Gone’. “We wrote it about having a bunch of gay friends and taking over the world,” Bird laughs. “It’s so important to have that core foundational group of people around you, and if you don’t, it’s really difficult. That’s why they’re so sacred to me because I didn’t for a while and it’s scary out here, man.”
‘Gentleman’ concocts a universe of swagger and sass, allowing the singer to channel a heightened character version of herself a la Aladdin Sane or Ziggy Stardust that’s “me but on 100”. However, the world the record is entering into – particularly within Trump’s America and the increasing stronghold of Reform Britain – is, indeed, a scary place to be an openly queer artist. In response to the threat around her, Bird’s answer is to defiantly raise her voice even louder. “It does make me worry, but that’s also why it’s so important to do it. When the world is in a place of insecurity and crisis, with conservatism rising more than ever, that’s when you have to lean in,” she says.
“They’re trying to make you feel othered, and trying to make you feel scared, and that’s their tactic. So that’s why it’s important to create those communities and put out art that’s loud and unafraid and that people can lean on,” she continues. “It’s really important to keep going through it and turn it up a little bit.”
They’re trying to make you feel othered, and trying to make you feel scared, and that’s their tactic. So that’s why it’s important to create communities and put out art that’s loud and unafraid and that people can lean on
Towa Bird
‘Gentleman’ doesn’t just turn up the heat in terms of its proudly queer lyrical content, it also takes influence from the very white, very male guitar scene of the ‘00s and feeds it through a fresh lens. The hooks of ‘Daisy’ are pure early Strokes; the sparkling festival bounce of ‘Don’t Wanna Hear About It’ could be a lost Two Door Cinema Club hit. That era of indie, Bird nods, was formative to her. “A lot of this record is going back to what I really gravitated to as a 15 year old, listening to music on the school bus,” she says. Yet, as a 15 year old, there were very few people playing those songs that looked or sounded anything like her. “I would have loved to see more women or more non-men playing guitar when I was growing up, but that just wasn’t the case. Most of my guitar heroes and artist influences who I looked up to for their technicality, were all boys, sadly,” she says. “But I do think that is changing, and it’s really cool to be able to see.”
Part of that change is from young people finding artists like Bird and seeing someone they could follow in the footsteps of. “I’ll sometimes speak to fans after a show and they’ll tell me that they’ve started to learn the bass or guitar. I feel that there’s a real desire now, with everything becoming fake with AI, where people want to gravitate towards things that are actually tangible and physical and real,” she enthuses. “And I think that, weirdly enough, there’s a cultural shift back to the instrument because of that. You can literally feel the vibrations against your body when you play the guitar. So that would be my ideal: people picking up instruments and starting bands again and hanging out with their friends in tiny, gross band rooms that fucking smell like BO and playing ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. That would be a utopia!”
Though ‘Gentleman’ wasn’t conceived in a smelly box room, it was very much created with friends. Producer Patrick Wimberley, formerly of Chairlift and the man behind the desk for records by MGMT and Blood Orange, helped set the pace of the sessions. Every day, the pair would spend the first 20 minutes “writing a fun little punk song and not worrying about lyrics or where it might fit”. Both ‘Gentleman’’s Runaways-esque title track and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘ fuzzy guitars of ‘Gap In Your Teeth’ were born from this heady, unfiltered way of thinking. “It makes a lot of sense because it’s the first thing that comes out of you when your brain is still fresh,” Bird suggests. “My internal monologue clearly has shit to say!”
On the propulsive bass and indie disco synths of ‘Dirty Habits’ – a track she wrote alongside Rapp – her inner voice sets about laying waste to the nepo babies and fast-tracked stars taking an increasing stronghold on the arts. “It’s so hard in your Beverly Hills / Guess you’ll never really know what’s real… What job are you gonna try next? I bet you want mine, be my guest,” she intones. Though a leg up would have been nice, the skills that Bird has honed since her beginnings, first on 2024 debut ‘American Hero’ and now on its follow-up, have provided her with a far more sturdy foundation for anything that might come next. “It would have been awesome to be born with those things and to have those doors open at a young age, but it also makes me feel more secure and more confident in myself if I’m able to open those doors on my own. But God,” she laughs, it would have been a blessing if my dad was a music producer and my mum was an art curator or something…”
Towa Bird might not have been born a ready-made pop star, but she’s found a way of crafting her own image of one: a non-conforming and multiplicitous spirit whose only hard-and-fast absolute is in the space she wants to create for her fans. Her gigs, she says with visibly joy, have been becoming increasingly vital places for the people that attend them. “I wonder if it is a response to what’s happening in government, but I do feel like people are really bonding together and becoming a cohesive community,” she smiles. “Because I have such a specifically queer audience, I’ve heard stories of fans coming and making friends or meeting their girlfriends or just finding like-minded people. It feels really important that I can provide a space where people can be what they want and cut their hair or get tattoos and pierce their nose and their eyebrows. That’s sick! Go ahead!”
If you’re looking for love, maybe Bird has subconsciously become a far better matchmaker than the apps. “Yeah, just come to a Towa Bird show and look confused and hopefully someone will come up to you!” she laughs. The singer is riffing on the bit, but she obviously genuinely loves it. Having spent the last two years around Rapp’s next level of fame, with a string of arena dates in support of Billie Eilish also under her belt, it’s not stadium-level success that’s fuelling Bird but an altogether more human dream. “It’s very English of me to be like, ‘Wherever I end up, I end up!’ But my focus isn’t necessarily on being the biggest pop star in the world,” she says. “That’s never been my MO. I’m just excited to be able to play my fucking stupid guitar.”
Towa Bird might be your sexual awakening, she might encourage you to pick up an instrument or she might provide the soundtrack as you find your community. But most of all, like her inspirations that came before her, it’s Bird’s absolute determination to live free of any boxes that you suspect might have the biggest impact. Right now, she’s feeling like a ‘Gentleman’, but next? She’s set herself up to go anywhere.
‘Gentleman’ is out now. Buy the vinyl.
