For all we wax poetic about youth, would any of us be brave enough to actually go back and relive it? Scroll through Snapchat memories or re-read teenage diaries and see if you could survive it again: breaking up with boyfriends because you thought you weren’t good enough for them; coughing up blunt smoke to impress older kids; awkwardly lingering at parties and watching everyone else to try to figure out who you were.
Such is the anti-nostalgia of Tiffany Day. In interviews, the 26-year-old electro-pop artist and producer has referenced growing up as one of few Asian teenagers in Wichita, Kansas, and feeling perpetually nerdy and uncool. As HALO, her second album, attests, maybe we never really leave high school; here, Day takes these growing pains and supercharges them with the sugary sounds of electroclash. “AMERICAN GIRL” lurches with quavering synths, shy as wallflowers, as Day confesses: “Now I’m so anxious at the function, getting fucked up on some shit/I never planned on even trying, I just wanted to fit in.” And while “DOIT4ME”, on first listen, sounds like a deep-fried ode to getting slizzard—all pulsating four-on-the-floor, obliterating walls of scuzzy supersaw synths, and tweaked-out cooing—it’s really meant for the girls hiding behind their phones at the party, nervously fiddling between the Find My and Settings apps (“It’s so funny I won’t look at my name/Lit up on my phone screen”).
In Day’s hands, electroclash hallmarks—crunchy McDonald’s Sprite electronica, chopped vocals, brain-tingling overstimulation—are beamed like a laser onto teen angst, frying up hormones into sizzling overdrive. The troubles she tackles on HALO are often small, but she cranks up the volume to magnify them—mirroring the emotional overload of growing up, where what matters is not the existential weight of these experiences but how overwhelming and real they feel. On “PRETTY4U,” Day’s voice is drenched in Auto-Tune fuzz as she promises she can be pretty too; it’s the sonic equivalent of aggressively FaceTuning your selfies while wondering if second puberty is actually a thing. “COPYCAT” finds Day idolizing the cool older girl—the one with the pretty braids, knocking back shots on a Sunday like it’s nothing—and contemplating what it’d be like to copy her. Yet right when Day is on the cusp of saying so—“I just wanna be your…”—her voice blitzes out into a cyclone of chiptune glitches. When you’re young, you can’t always express exactly what it is you want; all you know is that you want something.
Day first got her start as a bedroom-pop artist, and HALO marks a pivot into electronic music. The move has prompted a flurry of skepticism and controversy—including an accusation of plagiarism—in a scene wary of trend-hopping, post-Brat opportunists. Yet HALO feels both like a new exploration and an extension of Day’s perennial bedroom-pop sensibilities, and you can hear the DNA of earlier projects coursing through her new album’s coming-of-age confessionals. Day approaches medication, her struggles with OCD, messy breakups, and new therapists with a diaristic immediacy: This is Olivia Rodrigo for the kids vaping in the bathroom and crashing out on Instagram Reels comments sections. At times, the songwriting can veer into sounding juvenile, like the glacial trap-inflected “TELL ME WHAT I DID”, whose lyrics—“What a fucking switch/Kiss me on my lips/Then you fuck a bitch/I was on a trip, you were in her hips”—come off like the edgy finsta poetry of someone who’s just learned to curse.
Still, at its best, HALO wields electroclash’s chaos to capture the blown-out excesses of youth, where every emotion feels like you’re experiencing it for the first time. Album standout “SAME LA” opens with a cutesy ahem—functionally a teen pop-rock record-scratch of “You're probably wondering how I got here”—before Day eventually chants: “I’m scared to talk talk talk to you/’Cause my brain thinks everyone hates me.” Swirls of synths follow like a churning whirlpool of insecurity. Yet by the end, the song explodes into a crushing wall of sound, Day’s voice spawning in triples above a screeching electronica bed. You can’t talk through this; you can barely think. All you can do is feel everything while you slowly become who you’re meant to be.
