Vietnamese pop music is going through a renaissance. Led by Gen Z artists in both the mainstream and underground, a number of singers over the past couple of years—Wren Evans, Mỹ Anh, NÂN, Vĩ (f.k.a. Aprxel)—have released vital albums that have defined their country’s globalized R&B landscape. The biggest of them all is tlinh, a sort of Vietnamese Ariana Grande whose songs are as seductively intimate as they are silky smooth. Her best songs were produced by the Hanoi-born Phạm Phú Nguyên, or 2pillz, a producer who became known for his role in the reality competition show Rap Việt. His debut studio album, PILLZCASSO, is a breezy and confident collection of dance pop, bringing on numerous Vietnamese artists for an hour’s worth of beach-ready partying, comedowns included. While easygoing and subdued, it’s the most robust statement in V-pop all year.
One noteworthy aspect of PILLZCASSO is that it functions like a DJ set. The official album upload on YouTube is slightly different from what’s on streaming services, and presents 2pillz playing through his songs as a continuous mix (two years ago, he released a similar video called a “mixset”). The imagery is important: He stands alongside a DJ controller and numerous instruments, positioned like Calvin Harris doing Funk Wav Bounces. But PILLZCASSO is more tonally unified than the Scottish producer’s LPs; here, every featured guest is subsumed by soft-hued atmospherics, falling in line with what 2pillz calls “lắk lành,” a catch-all term for his smooth, vitalizing dance music. When he incorporates reggae basslines and skanking guitars on “BƯỚC ĐI/NÁN LẠI?,” it’s Văn Mai Hương’s hushed singing—interspersed with chopped-up vocals in passages of moody house—that ties everything together. Every voice is putty for 2pillz to hold together his shapeshifting productions.
The best tracks on PILLZCASSO thrive on such seamlessness. “KIỀM CHẾ ĐÔI TAY ĐI NÀO” is a seductive 2-step track that tastefully throws in Jersey club kicks for one pre-chorus. Vũ Phụng Tiên flaunts her addictiveness before delivering a taunt: “Wanna think twice?” An EDM riser arrives before landing on a massive drop, and then everything switches back to the skittering garage beat; these agile maneuvers imagine the dizzying, heart-fluttering highs of a crush as stadium-ready scorcher. “NOBODY BUT YOU” follows it and serves, essentially, as wish fulfillment: The titular line swirls around lush instrumentation, occupying a sensual zone indebted to UK bass, future garage, EDM, and vinahouse.
It would be remiss if vinahouse, a Vietnamese style of house music that typically takes the form of domestic pop remixes, didn’t work its way into PILLZCASSO. Like other EDM-adjacent house music styles, vinahouse is defined by its big, bouncy basslines, but it takes a melancholy turn in “MỘT KHI NÓI YÊU MỌI CHUYỆN CHẤM HẾT” (“Once You Say I Love You, It’s Over”). With Vũ’s lyrics about loneliness, the springing beat embodies her desperate attempts at reuniting with an old flame. In “LÁ THU VÀNG RƠI MANG TÌNH YÊU TỚI,” 2pillz samples a song by Phương Dung, an esteemed singer of nhạc vàng (“yellow music”). In reworking Vietnamese bolero—the beautifully impassioned nhạc vàng style based on the original Latin genre—2pillz’s song, as celebratory as it sounds, can be framed in this decades-old musical form of endearing, unbridled sentimentality.
What makes PILLZCASSO a Vietnamese pop album can be tricky to define sonically. In one sense, it’s obvious that he’s evoking traditional instruments like the t'rưng (a bamboo xylophone) on “ĐƯA EM VÀO TRÒNG” and the đàn đá (a lithophone) on “THÁC NÌNG.” But sometimes it’s about Eastern melodies—the chiming flourishes across “NGỪI ĐẸP ƠIII” and “CHỈ MỘT CÂU THẦN CHÚ”—or an embrace of the chintzy, like the synth flutes across “NGHĨ MỘT TÍ.” I hear songs like these and think about Vietnamese bolero’s ability to uphold MIDI instruments as authentic vessels of languor and longing. Dig deeper and the DNA of Vietnamese popular music is everywhere: “GET YOU OUT OF MY MIND” has a melody that likely interpolates the chorus of Bang Kieu and Hồng Nhung’s famous rock ballad “LẮNG NGHE MÙA XUÂN VỀ.”
More than anything, it’s PILLZCASSO’s general confluence of feeling—the rubbery lilt of vinahouse mixed with the pathos of Vietnamese balladry—that grants these songs their specific flavor. “ĐẾN LÚC NÀY THÌ…” is part of a popular wave of Afrobeats-infused pop music, but tlinh’s singing grants it a distinct emotion. Younger singers are largely uninterested in the highly stylized, carefully enunciated vocalizations of Vietnamese bolero, opting to sing in a more natural way (this is what separates the Gen Z cohort from the biggest millennial V-pop stars, like Hoàng Thùy Linh). Still, it’s ultimately tlinh’s more natural delivery that sells the lyrics. “I just want to see you smile/Even though I’m not the one who can do that anymore,” she sings in Vietnamese; her confessional, conversational tone underlines the severity of her pain. Tracing the evolution of pop music is about looking at how young artists find ways to be represented, to make their universal struggles feel novel. No other V-pop album right now better represents this generational shift—and with more aplomb—than PILLZCASSO.
