Jen Awad Won't Stop Daydreaming
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Promiseland Takes On the Night
I find expression playing all mediums as the message
The song and video for Only Broken captures the energy you feel in the audience at your live shows. How do you infuse your music with the aliveness of your performances?
I find comfort in the fragility of words. Poetry feels alive to me. Finding rhyme and rhythm in the studio to a simple beat, a chant, a simple line that echoes my day: “I’m not dead, I’m only broken”, which is a line from the verse in the single. I would say this in conversation after tripping on the sidewalk to friends, “I’m not dead, I’m only broken.” falling overboard, out of sight “I’m not dead, I’m only broken” after a late night out, scrambling to find any sensible words combined/sunrise. You get the meme. I need to stretch more, “sigh” I’m not dead…
The live show is a play, a performance. Part of its nature is humor. Through serious ideas. From studio, stage, to video. I find expression playing all mediums as the message.
Only Broken is about mortality and the ephemeral nature of life. There’s a similar fleetingness to performing something live…
This is why I love the live performance, the songs can repeat but the energy cannot. It’s a test of endurance. A sacrifice. A ritual. A little bit of me dies each time, out of pure exhaustion, vomit, extreme outer body exposure, yet I feel ageless and somehow stronger and stronger.
Michelle Lamy once said,“I follow a flow of attraction and try to make a living out of it.” Which is the best way I’ve heard someone describe making art.
I follow a flow of pain and sorrow and try to make a song out of it [laughs] and let the fortune of life attach itself. People try to give me advice all the time, especially when it comes to right brain financial jargon. And yes, I would love the money tree to spill into my pockets, but it’s only ever when I’m following my gut instincts that I feel truly artistically and mentally satisfied.
There’s been a long conversation about how the physical will become more precious as more of what we consume—art, music, fashion—becomes AI generated. I tend to think it’s easier to replicate human happiness than pain on an emotional level. Do you think there will be a premium on pain in the future?
Wow, let me ponder this for a moment… I do think we need to come back to truth in human interaction. Offline awkwardness at its best. Debate, sharing of objects and ideas. We’ve been too safe, too vicarious, for too long, word spewing all over the internet with no accountability. I do think we are in the early stages of the death of the internet (as we know it). Playing around with AI feels about as trial and error as early programs from the 90s first chat rooms, buggy games, a little like early Microsoft paint. We just can’t yet see its limitations. Like early cgi. Some things feel a little off, some a lot. I could never fully buy totally into cgi as I felt I was looking at predictable 0s and 1s with no room for imagination… There’s the warm verisimilitude of an animatronic puppet, then there’s the cold simulation of much of AI. Although Ai mixed with imagination is pretty exciting. Content has become very meta. And I love meta! But in warm blooded life we can be meta with each other. “I’m not dead, I’m only broken”.
There is already a premium on pain, just come to a show or any show of an artist surging through 2025, and pain is always there. Even the most pristine pop show, dancing in heels is pain. I just explore it openly. Pain, fragility, rage, the beauty of mistakes. Also, I burnt my hand this morning on a boiling pot of water. Not so premium pain.
I do think we are in the early stages of the death of the internet (as we know it)
What’s your favorite movie with a non-happy ending?
Donnie Darko. (Though there are so many angles).
Love erased !
Love erased !
Love erased !
It so deeply hurts that at the end of the film Gretchen doesn’t know who Donnie is. But there is so much comfort in that too. There is comfort that in some timeline their love did exist and maybe that’s enough for the viewer, and for love in general. Love in life for me feels just as fleeting. Like a dream where you really get to know someone, but wake to find that you’re two strangers un-entwined physically.
What would Only Broken look like expressed as another medium?
App Name: Only Broken
Tagline: “I watched a thousand memories fade away.”
Core Concept: Only Broken is an emotionally intelligent AI app that scans your phone’s media, photos, videos, voice notes, texts and weaves them into deeply personal, dreamlike memory sequences. These aren’t albums or timelines, they’re poetic reconstructions. Sometimes they’re truthful. Sometimes they’re lies you once believed.
The app doesn’t just organize your past. It narrates it
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Elita: The band living in a video game
When I first sat down with front-woman Elita, aka Emma, she told me a story about the electric track Only Famous for My Tits which almost didn’t make it on the album as it’s a bit different from the rest. Amidst a crowded hotel bar in the Lower East Side, she recalled a time when she and Tim were back in their small town of St. John's, Newfoundland and their server was being noticeably rude towards her. When Tim got up to go to the bathroom he overheard the snarky waitress mocking Emma saying, “Oh, she’s just famous for her tits.” And thus, a hit was born. They went home and wrote a killer song about it.
In their latest era, Elita is basically a band living inside a video game building each new level bit by bit. We got a behind-the-scenes look at their latest music video, Ego, which is filled with nods to Trainspotting and rage rooms. In the interview below, we talked about everything from the video to their distinctly Elita sound.
How was making the video?
Emma: It was really easy. All we had to do was perform. Everyone was amazing. It was Trainspotting inspired with druggy dens. Then we just fucking trashed it. It was really fun.
How did the band come to be?
E: The dudes knew each other for a while but I met them both around the same time maybe around 2017. Tim's my boyfriend. We met through a mutual friend and went skateboarding. It was a really cute little first time meeting someone…and then we broke into an abandoned school.
No way is that something you would usually do?
E: At the time we were doing that, just getting up to whatever. We skateboarded through the abandoned school. Krank is the bassist and I met him at the same time.
So you guys formed your little gang in Newfoundland?
E: Yeah I never saw myself doing music. It was not on the radar at all. But one night I remember they sent me an instrumental and I wrote so quickly. Within a few hours I sent them back singing on my phone and it became our first song. It came together so quickly. We recorded it with super shitty equipment and in 2018 we put it out. We were thinking it was nothing, it was just fun. It was fun getting to express myself in that way because I never really did that. Did not expect it to turn into this.
That's wild but sounds so organic.
E: It was really cool. And then we have a North American tour coming up.
Do you feel like knowing each other so long makes it easier?
Tim: Me and Krank have played in probably 30 random bands together before we ever started this one with Emma. I sort of take it for granted but it adds to the spontaneity because we’re comfortable to just go for shit.
Have you had a favorite city you've played so far?
E: I love playing New York. No seriously, like I do. The people are always the coolest.
Mm-hmm I love to hear that.
E: Texas always gives us the most love. San Antonio and Dallas.
You guys have such a cool, alternative thing going. Maybe smaller cities are missing a bit of that.
E: Yeah, I think so. Small-town stuff. You just want to be seen and felt and I think that there's always some alt people in the crowd that connect with that. I'm originally from and I spent 17 years in a town of 700 people. So I'm from a really small town. I had to travel 40 minutes to go to school.
Do you have a favorite song from the album right now?
T: I like Hikikomori. It was done really carefree and I like the way Emma’s voice sounds in it. And Hikikomori as a topic is something that entrusts all of us and it’s always felt like an honest song.
What’s something you feel like people aren’t expecting from this album that might be a surprise?
Krank: The final track, Hell Hill. It's 10 minutes long and it’s basically a horror soundscape with a bunch of mini songs within it including one of our first unreleased songs called Cemetery that people have been trying to get since 2017. That is slipped in the middle of the song as an Easter Egg.
How would each of you describe the album in 3 words?
T: Spiky, soft, fun.
E: Gothic, electronica, Indie.
K: Foggy, pixelated, distorted.
Hell Hill is available on all streaming platforms, give it a listen here.
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SUKII BABY IS LIMITLESS AND YOU CAN BE TOO
Her childhood in Japan as a “hāfu,” a term used for kids who are not fully Japanese, wasn’t easy. As a child, not being able to afford the things others could awakened a determination in her. Over time, she became an amalgamation of all her wildest dreams. All her interests and eras over the years have given us the Sukii Baby we’re getting to know now.
You might know her from a certain album cover or more recently her thriving streaming community. Yasuka’s love of video games has always been present. Her father is a computer scientist from the generation of Star Wars and Final Fantasy. “I actually grew up on every single console that there has ever been made…I pretty much played almost every game,” she shared. She started streaming more video game content after taking a half decade hiatus from screens in general including TV and movies. Her break came from another awakening and pivotal moment in her life—a loss of a loved one.
SUKII BABY wears TOP by WILLY CHAVARRÍA, JEANS by ACNE STUDIOS, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
“I had promised my grandmother that I would go to college in America, because it's easier. When I was on the plane, I had just seen my great grandmother, and she passed away when I was on the flight back to America. So I was like, ‘I need to lock in.’ I need to take life a little bit more seriously. I got multiple jobs, I wasn't living with my dad anymore, because you know how parent-child relationships kind of go. You get older, you leave the nest. It's different for everybody, but that was just not a place where I was able to live. So, I was living on my own, sometimes doing good, sometimes not doing so good,” she revealed candidly. “I don't come from money whatsoever so, I had to figure everything out by myself.”
In her early teens, she was dabbling in Adobe Photoshop and eventually became a master. After growing out of meme-making, she started gaining inspiration from unlikely sources ranging from her dreams, Animal Planet, the Cooking Channel, and the Travel Channel. Her cyanotype prints, in particular, have magnetic emotions tied to them with imagery from all over in hues melancholy blue. “I would just indulge in so much culture and everything around the world so much that I just wanted to start making photos that make you feel something.” Once she mastered Photoshop, she added video editing and creative directing to her repertoire of talents.
SUKII BABY wears JACKET and SKIRT by JORDAN LUCA, BRA by DSQUARED2, HEADBAND by RINALDYYUNARDI, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
I've always definitely wanted to make novelty items. I guess that's what kind of artist I am. More novelty rather than traditional. I like things that are bigger than what they're supposed to be.
SUKII BABY wears TOP by PRO CLUB, SHORTS by CHAMPION, GLOVES by HANDSOME STOCKHOLM, NECKLACE by MARTINE ALI, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT WHISPER.
While in college, she changed her major thrice, a fact that many of us share in common with her, before ultimately deciding to go “full force” into art. First, it was architecture, then interior design then to animation. ”In animation, you can make whatever you want. It's not necessarily just focused on housing, focused on blueprints, focused on CAD, you can basically go anywhere,” she mused. She had wanted to work at Disney studios at one point, then even Adult Swim but ultimately started her own thing with taking commissions, printing designs on her 3D printer, using her computer and mechanics skills, and selling pieces on Depop. Clearly, she’s a self-starter, a go-getter, if you will. A characteristic you need to build success all from scratch.
She’s even into fixing up cars, a love that came from her grandfather’s work as a mechanic. You could call her an engineer—a fitting addition to her growing gifts in life. In high school, other kids had G-wagons, Mustangs, and Hellcats while Sukii’s old Forerunner once stopped in the middle of nowhere. “The universal joint fell out and I just heard a scraping noise on the ground and I got out of the car and looked underneath. A big, long pipe was just skidding across the concrete underneath. Ironically, the next question in the interview was if she’d work on a fixer-upper. She laughed at that.
- LEFT: SUKII BABY wears COAT by SACAI, TOP by OAK & ACORN, SKIRT by SCULPTOR, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER. RIGHT: SUKII BABY wears BIKINI by TREND HAUS, JACKET + SKIRT by NAMILIA X ED HARDY, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
Her art has been a grounding force for her throughout her life. In school, although she was an extraordinary student in other subjects, English was her Achilles heel. “I would be so frustrated that I couldn't speak English like everyone else could. I would spend so many days, so much of my time, just trying to learn. I had so much pent up frustration from that. I was never mad about boys, I was never mad about friends, I was just simply mad about English. I used to go mute a lot and I wouldn't really talk to people,” she shared. Yasuka kept art gifts often from her family in Japan and over time, her art became her main source of expression to cope with her frustrations.
“I've always definitely wanted to make novelty items. I guess that's what kind of artist I am. More novelty rather than traditional. I like things that are bigger than what they're supposed to be,” she said. “I really just enjoy using my hands, because I truly don't think I'm the best at using my verbal skills. I didn't even know that you can have these talents as jobs.” She wasn’t banking on being a famous or rich artist, she just wanted to be happy as her upbringing was the opposite. She cites designer Yoon Ambush and painter Egon Schiele as some of her favorite artists. Yoon’s influences from Japan have inspired Sukii’s artist journey while Schiele’s works make her feel like she’s in his paintings and feel the emotions of the images depicted.
Her mother is another artist in her own right that’s been a forever inspiration for Sukii. She noted her parents would jokingly argue about where she gets her creativity from—it’s definitely her mom. Sukii’s words, not mine. “My mom's always been like that girl.” She’s passed down so much to Sukii from her curiosity about the world to how she carries herself. She fights for what she wants and her strength and outlook on life has impacted the multi-hyphenate in a myriad of ways.
LEFT: SUKII BABY wears TOP by DSQUARED2, TUTU by TREND HAUS, SWEATPANTS by CHAMPION, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER. RIGHT: SUKII BABY wears bikini by TREND HAUS, JACKET + SKIRT by NAMILIA X ED HARDY, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
My mom's always been like that girl.
SUKII BABY wears TOP by MELITTA BAUMEISTER, PANTS by BRIGADE, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
Even her personal style is influenced by her mother’s. “She literally has rainbow hair right now. Like, that's crazy!” Eclectic is the word she used to describe her aesthetic. In Japan, she had her teen phases like many of us. We’re talking an emo-scene era. Think zip-up hoodies, heavy black eyeliner, and a beanie with that signature side bang peaking out. She recalls growing into her body earlier than the other girls in school and making clothes from unlikely fabrics due to growing up in a low income household. “I was cool like that. I didn't really care about people’s opinions because I was so worried about what was going on at home I was just trying to get through my day.” She still wears a lot of her dad’s clothes, though. “My dad had the craziest swag.” His archive includes pieces from Japan in the ‘90s ranging from FUBU to Timberland boots. “Nowadays, he just wears Sketchers,” she said as a giggle escaped. Now, with her eclectic style she’s wearing her pair Salomon XT Whispers with ideas to make them even more her by adding pearl beads. “Accessories on shoes, I think, are so beautiful.”
What doesn't meet the eye is how passionate she is about education and building community. “I’m getting loud overall about women in more fields and I’m definitely screaming, hooting and hollering about art.” She’s hoping to serve her community with multiple charities that make an actual difference from clean water to solar power. “A lot of people aren't teaching younger generations how to do anything. That's kind of really what I use streaming for. I use the stream to play games, but we also have real conversations, and I teach them how to do different mediums of art or engineering or just whatever else that they might want to learn that they didn't know about,” she asserted. “Sometimes I surprise them [the streaming audience], so they don't get so used to being comfortable, like thinking, ‘Oh, we're gonna hop on here and play a game.’ No, y'all are gonna learn something today! I'm getting loud about education!”
SUKII BABY wears COAT by SACAI, TOP by OAK & ACORN, SKIRT by SCULPTOR, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
She’s utterly limitless and is making sure the next generation is too. This year and the rest of her future looks like having a solo art exhibition featuring her pieces from cyanotypes to sculptures, launching her brand that will be reminiscent of souvenirs that can be held onto throughout life. “I hope people take souvenirs home that help them with themselves and their future, if that makes sense. And, you know, taking a little piece of me with them, that's such a blessing to even think about.” She’s also on a quest to be on the Discovery Channel or National Geographic. Teaching is one of her greatest passions, and not just on one particular subject. She just loves teaching people about things that they didn’t know as she had a “bookworm” childhood. Spewing random facts is a hidden talent that keeps getting unveiled.
RIGHT:: SUKII BABY wears TOP by MELITTA BAUMEISTER, PANTS by BRIGADE, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOES SALMON XT-WHISPER. LEFT: SUKII BABY wears TOP by WILLY CHAVARRÍA, JEANS by ACNE STUDIOS, SUNGLASSES by BONNIE CLYDE, SHOE SALOMON XT-WHISPER.
She’s healing her inner child by having the freedom to make and do whatever she wants and taking note from her grandmother’s wise words, “You’ll never know if you don’t try.” That phrase is the definition of courage and boldness to the young artist. “Being courageous definitely means walking through the door of starting or being whatever it is that you're trying to be.”
