Spotlight: Alann8h Introduces Her Newest EP, 'Apollo 8'
A MIXTURE OF R&B AND POP - Alann8h’s sound is endlessly captivating and original. Her music is a culmination of her own lived experiences, as she cites moving from Thailand to Canada for her inclination to blend different sounds and take inspiration from multiple genres. It’s something she has fully embraced as a part of her music. “I shouldn't just try to keep my sound into one box,” she explains. If the “boxes” her music fits into changes with each song, the feeling that her music elicits remains consistent. Listening to her released tracks, I am catapulted back to nights cruising down the road just to listen to Blonde. Her tracks feel like the ethereal release that music has been missing since 2016.
Just a few years ago, Alann8h took a leap of faith when she spontaneously decided to publish her music online. For a girl who admits to naturally shying away from vulnerability, it was the first of many risks she took for the sake of her music. It didn’t take long for her to realize she had made the right move.
Despite being a relatively new artist, Alann8h has gained nearly 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, and has pushed out multiple EPs. When I asked if that experience taught her to trust herself in other ways since then, she pointed toward the struggle she faced when people started dishing out criticism. “People like to give you opinions and criticisms which is totally fine,” she said. “I've learned that I’ve got to stay true to myself and what I want to put out because when I do that, people start liking me for me… trusting myself means staying true to who I am and what I like the most.”
Her latest, Apollo 8, marks yet another impressive feat in her growth as an artist. “This EP has surprised me in many ways because I've always seen myself as more of an alternative R&B artist above all else. However, when I first started showing some people some of the new sounds I have been creating they all told me it was some of their favorite stuff they've heard from me.”
Tracks like “Rings of Saturn” pleasantly surprise you by the way in which pop dominated its sound. Listening to her previous tracks, I had grown used to a jazzier Alann8h, but this new song seemed to evolve into something more in line with alternative pop, reminiscent of artists like Billie Eilish. I asked her if listeners could expect pop to play a heavier hand throughout the rest of her EP. “The sound of this new project is quite diverse... it is a lot more pop/alternative than my last project,” she explained. “There’s a song for all types of ears and preferences to listen to.”
Even if she is taking a new direction with her sound, the content within her songs feels nonetheless familiar. Her unreleased track is filled with her usual seamless flow of metaphors and synthetic instruments that make the listener instantly feel her sense of love, longing, and nostalgia for moments that made her feel most connected to the subject of her song. “Emotionally,” she admitted, “'Rings of Saturn' was the hardest to write because it was a song written when I was at a really low point, just trying to escape the reality of the real world and yearning for change,” she said. The song elicits intimate emotions of love and loss that seem almost universal given the past year and a half, which must be why I found myself playing it on repeat. Needless to say, I have officially joined the other 200,000 listeners eager to hear what the rest of her EP has in store.
With Apollo 8 now out, Alann8h is already looking forward to what’s next. “In the next few years,” she said, “I’m hoping to have created an album, played my own live concert, and maybe have gone on tour.” At the rate this musician is going, those dreams might be coming sooner than she thinks.
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