In another life, Towa Bird never picked up a guitar. She never achieved viral success by covering popular songs on TikTok, or opened for Billie Eilish, or released her debut album, "American Hero." Her dreams were nearly extinguished by a skeptical teacher in Thailand, where the half-English and half-Filipino musician spent her early childhood.
"I wanted to play Chuck Berry and John Lennon," Bird said. "He was like, first, you have to learn how to sit."
On a warm March day, Bird, 27, paused in the aisle of a downtown Los Angeles bookstore to demonstrate the pose, contorting her tall frame around an imaginary instrument, one leg perched across the other. "That was for sure sexism," she said. She noticed a nearby collection of poems by Jay Parini, his implacable face glaring from the book's cover, and laughed: "Look, he agrees with me."
But Bird not only learned to play the guitar; her musical prowess is beyond dispute. "American Hero," released in 2024, is an adrenaline hit of an album bursting with tuneful, urgent rock songs. Her forthcoming "Gentleman," due May 15, is a second wind. The producer Patrick Wimberly (MGMT, Solange), who helmed all 11 tracks, noted the denouement of the standout song, "69 BPM," which features a lip-licking, Pink Floyd-channeling solo.
"She just improvised that," he said. "The guitar is not a costume for Towa. It's an extension of her."
Bird was dressed in a crisp white shirt, jeans and a vintage navy pinstripe tie from Dior -- a dapper ensemble designed to complement "Gentleman" and the pop-punk strut of its title track. "My masculinity is almost femininity, like pure androgyny," she said, reflexively running a hand through her tower of curls, which are so impressive it's hard to believe she once shaved them off. This record, she said, "is a closer representation to who I am becoming and who I want to become."
After leaving Thailand and returning to her native Hong Kong in 2010, a 12-year-old Bird made two important discoveries: She realized that she was gay and, inspired by grainy YouTube video of Jimi Hendrix, that she wanted to revisit the electric guitar. By 14, she was performing in dive bars with her band the Glass Onions. ("The drinking age in Hong Kong isn't a thing," she explained. "I knew my way around, I'll tell you that.")
Seven years later, in early 2020, Bird was living in London and working at a pub when she recorded her first TikTok video. Looking low-key stylish and blissfully focused, she jammed along to Arctic Monkeys' "R U Mine?" Overnight, she said, she went from having zero followers to 10,000. She kept up the covers (Tame Impala, Harry Styles) throughout the pandemic and interest from management soon followed.
"It felt fast," she said. "It was fast. I always thought that I was going to be in service to someone else, have a real job, maybe open a bar." Instead, she moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2021 to play guitar with Olivia Rodrigo in the pop star's documentary "Driving Home 2 U (a Sour Film)" and commence work on "American Hero."
Up until this point in her short career, Bird has had to prove herself primarily in front of live audiences that came to see bigger artists, among them Eilish and Bird's girlfriend, Reneé Rapp. The pair went public in early 2024 after Bird spent six months opening for Rapp on the actress-singer's Snow Hard Feelings Tour. "I had 30 minutes to, like, convince an arena full of people that I'm worthy of being there," she said, which she did in part by singing and shredding along to Rapp's hit "Tummy Hurts" as she knelt before her, an improvised bit of swagger that quickly became a fan-favorite moment.
Wimberly, formerly of the synth-pop duo Chairlift with Caroline Polachek, was keen to work with Bird after catching the Brooklyn leg of her mini-headlining tour in late 2024. He watched as she tossed her signature mane throughout a sweaty, anthemic set including her ode to carnal pleasure "Drain Me!," the anticapitalist screed "B.I.L.L.S." and a muscular cover of Blur's "Song 2." "The crowd was nuts," he said. "I felt like the energy of her shows hadn't fully been captured in her recording yet."
Bird and Wimberly, along with several additional writers, began work on "Gentleman" in February of last year with the goal of pushing Bird "out of my comfort zone," she said. "I spent a lot of time on my first record thinking about how I can best package it for the audience," she continued during a drive to nearby Echo Park. "This one I was like, what do I want to do?"
Occasionally, Rapp would join them in the studio, including for the one-upping pop charmer "Your Girl" and the recent single "Dirty Habit," a bouncy, breathy takedown of entitled peers for which Rapp convinced Bird to sing in a higher register. "We obviously know each other very well and we both know where we want to grow," Bird said.
Elsewhere, like on "Dog" and the electro-pop number "Afterglow," the results were more libidinous. "Put me on your lap / Pet me just like that / Tell me I'm so good / Tell me I'm the best," Bird sings on "Dog," backed by throbbing synths. "At some point I was like, hey, do we need to try a song that's not so sexy today?" Wimberly recalled. "But inevitably they all ended up being somewhat sexy."
Bird and Wimberly’s mutual fandom of the riot grrrl icon Kathleen Hanna led to a request for her collaboration. “This is right up my alley,” Hanna recalled thinking after hearing the demos in a phone interview. “These songs are dance-y and fun and I like the subject matter — kind of complicated love songs.” While Bird and her team worked on their phones, Hanna scribbled ideas on a menu with a broken pencil and, together, they came up with “All Gone,” a song about answering the booty call of the hottest girl in the room, which revels in the pogo-punk influence of Hanna’s band Le Tigre.
"Some of the lyrics Towa wrote were nasty in a good way," Hanna added, laughing. "I was like,'You're a [expletive] heartthrob. You need heartthrob songs.'"
Over snacks at a cafe,Bird said that"Gentleman"was somewhat intended to be sexually liberating.Coming of age in Hong Kong and Thailand,where same-sex marriage was illegal(Thailand has since changed its laws),left an indelible mark."Not only is it not legal,but you don't exist,"she said.
Bird is close with her parents and her older sister,Catherine,for whom she had the letter “C” tattooed on her middle finger.“She was always pretty and smart and funny,and I was the weird little gremlin sister,”Bird said,laughing.
Her father nurtured her love of classic rock and soccer,which was Bird’s other ambition if music didn’t work out.Her mother,w ho is Catholic and took the family to church every Sunday,w as stricter.“She liked good grades,she liked order,”Bird said.“My parents are so supportive,but my upbringing wasn’t like whatever you dream,whatever your ambitions are,you can do it.”She paused.“That’s very American.”
“Gentleman” is brimming with confidence that perhaps in part reflects Bird’s nearly five years in the States.(She is the rare L.A. resident who sometimes prefers taking the city’s underused Metro system to driving.)She is badly missing the stage,having not played live since touring with Eilish at the end of 2024,and this time hopes to headline a tour of her own.
“That’s the more energetic,loud,taking-up-space part of my personality,”she said.“It was one of the reasons why I got into this in the first place:to be a vessel for communication between the music and the people.”