INTERVIEW: Audrey Nuna on her upcoming Australian tour: "It's the weirdest things that excite me, so it’s always a journey to find that."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 4 August 2025

New Jersey born, Los Angeles based Audrey Nuna is proving to be one of the most audacious, experimental, genre twisting artist in this generation of young musicians.

Born to Korean immigrant parents in 1999, Nuna taught herself to record music as a teenager and became so proficient she was accepted to study at New York University’s prestigious Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. She dropped out after one year after being discovered by producer Anwar Sawyer and by 2019 she was signed to major label Arista Records.

Success came quickly, and her songs were soon receiving streams in the millions, scoring major success with ‘Comic Sans’ featuring Jack Harlow, and ‘damn Right’. In 2021, she dropped her debut album a liquid breakfast which was followed by appearances at major festivals including Lollapalooza, Head in the Clouds, Day N Vegas, and Hangout.

What makes Nuna such a special artist is her truly musical fluidity. Dabbling in R&B, pop, rap, trap, hip hop and seemingly everything in between, she can authentically incorporate multiple genres in just a single song, making everything she does thrillingly new and different but also comfortably familiar.

Last October she released her second album TRENCH, which showcases her shapeshifting genius and was split into two halves ‘soft skin’ and ‘hard feelings’. ‘Nothing Feels The Same’ opens the album with a glimpse of jazz before merging into grimy hip hop interspersed with soulful piano and floaty vocals. ‘Suckin Up’ mixes rap verses with soft, almost angelic pop choruses.

‘Mine’ is an exhilarating reworking of the Brandy & Monica classic ‘The Boy Is Mine’, while ‘Jokes On Me’ is a gentle pop-R&B ballad. ‘Starving’ which features Teezo Touchdown leans fully into a pop sound, with an insistent pop and sweet melodies and harmonies, broken momentarily by Touchdown’s rap.

Frenetic, dance vibes crossed with rap appear on ‘Doggie Pound’, with ‘1-Way’ also flirting with a more gentle dance sound, ending in a repeated vocal loop.

The album ends on a gentle note with ‘2High’, one of those incredible tracks in which Nuna takes you on a full sonic trip, starting as a soft, electro tinged ballad '- ‘fuck it I’m dying to feel something good’ - with swirling, almost lullaby sounds before it descends into a darker sound, closing with disjointed electric swooshes.

Nuna is now bringing her TRENCH album tour to Australia, performing in Sydney on 10 August and Melbourne on 12 August. Her very first performances in Australia, these shows promise to bring Nuna’s exceptional, left of field artistry to life and are not to be missed. As she prepared for her Australian tour, we caught up with Nuna to find out all about she will bring to the shows and about her incredible music.

Hello Audrey, it is just so lovely to talk to you. You have this beautiful album TRENCH and you're bringing it and your wonderful visuals to Australia for the first time, which is just delicious. You've split the album into two sections, ‘soft skin’ and ‘hard feelings’, how does that split manifest itself in your show?
That's a great question. I think, first and foremost, what has meant the most visually for me has been the fashion, the styling. Texture, is something that I've always been so super into. My dad is in the garment business and I grew up seeing clothes getting manufactured, so I think fashion is one of the primary languages, the styling for the show is so much fun.

I also wanted to create a storyline that follows the arc of the character. So we decided to narrate that in different ways, but mostly through voice over and illustrating the trajectory of this character who goes from being very soft to kind of hard and more cold at the end.

I love that you talk about texture, because even sonically there's just so much texture to your music. We have trap, pop, R&B, and even these bonkers kind of futuristic sounds that I can't even pinpoint. Was music always an experimentation of sound for you, as opposed to containing one song?
I started out in that space of very free flow. As I get older, I'm starting to appreciate structure for what it is, but I’m don't think I'm somebody who naturally gravitates towards structure. Writing songs has taught me a lot about structure and design as opposed to just art. So it definitely did start as an exploration, and as an artist, I would love to always consider everything to be an exploration first and foremost. As I have more experience, I want to understand more about functionality and structure and all these things that in the beginning were very secondary to me. It’s trying to balance sonic exploration with what makes a song function very well, as opposed to just like pure exploration. My first love will always be exploration, trying to find that new thing that excites me. It's the weirdest things that excite me, so it’s always, for me, a journey to find that.

You've got this real sensibility leaning into the weirdest things that excite you but equally there's always this delicious, slick pop delivery. Has that been the music that you've always been drawn to and love, mixing those sounds with pure pop?
I'm so happy to hear that, because I never really even thought that about my own music. It's really gratifying to hear that I love pop, the reason I even wanted to become a singer was because when I was 12, Beyoncé did her Super Bowl halftime show, and I remember just being life changed by the power of so many people invested in a character who represents a certain thing. I respect pop music so much more than ever before to be honest. There was definitely a phase, especially in the making of TRENCH where I think I had distanced myself a bit from this idea of pop but lately I think it's the one of the genres that I respect the most. I think right now, especially with the youth and people in my generation, there's this culture that I'm guilty of having also, of putting in too much effort is not cool anymore. What I really respect about pop and what resonates with me about pop is just the relentless work ethic and consistency and discipline. A lot of people overlook that when it comes to pop music. I love the irony of just how unserious people think pop is, but in reality and in technicality, I think it's one of the most serious genre. So I really respect that and I'm glad to hear that you feel like there's some sort of resonance of pop in the stuff you've heard from me.

Speaking of insanely slick pop, on ‘Mine’ you have sampled the iconic ‘The Boy Is Mine’. When you are tinkering with other songs and pulling in samples and riffs where do you find these? Do you usually hear the song first, or do you have your own song going and then you go, ‘hold on a second, we can interpolate here.’
With this song, it was definitely an intentional homage to this era of music. It was actually an idea that a producer on the song, Myles William had had and pitched to me. I just loved the idea, I thought that it was so in line with this idea of soft skin, hard feelings. In general, I think I make songs about introspection and self and trying to be on the more self aware side of things. With an iconic song like ‘The Boy Is Mine’, what's so fun and playful about it is the competition and the banter between the two women and the angle that I loved about sampling that song was the idea of tipping that concept on its head and claiming this power over whoever it is, and that was what made me want to intentionally sample that song and take in a different direction.

We can't talk about pop without a quick nod to your pivotal role in KPop Demon Hunters. When you were first approached, did you have any idea about how big this thing was going to get?
I would be lying if I said that I knew that it was going to be like this, because I don't think anyone, including the producers, could have imagined this resonance with the culture. Maybe Maggie Kang, the director, she is such a visionary, always probably knew that this was a very, very special idea. Honestly, it's amazing to see the reaction. When I watched the film, I remember telling my mum, oh, my God I think this movie is going to do so well. The animation is so sick, the music is so catchy, I can't get it out of my head. But I don't think I was like, OI think this is going to be number one on Billboard, number one on Netflix, potentially the most watched film of all time on Netflix. I just never thought that, I don't think anyone would have guessed that.

Well, you're right. How can you guess that, it's just insane. I want to ask you a little bit about your background, because you have this incredible talent, and it led to some incredible things. You left the Clive Davis Institute for Arista Records at 20, What was it that gave you that assurance to go, ‘this is what I'm doing, I'm sure of what I'm doing, and I'm going to go straight into full pop star mode.’
People always ask me that, and the answer is so anticlimactic, because I think honestly, it was just naïveté, and not really having a sense of fear. I just felt like I had nothing to lose. I grew up with a very supportive mother figure who told me ‘do what you want to do, and if you fail, it's all good’. So I think I just like I'm gonna try this, and I don't really have anything to lose. The scariest part was culturally. Coming from a Korean family, it's very difficult to convince your parents to want to leave school, so I actually made a PowerPoint to present to them why it made sense for me to leave school. I included a quote from my dad, because he always told us, growing up ‘if your dream dies, your life also dies’. So I used his own words against him deviously, and I put together some bullshit pie chart graphs. I don't even know why the pie chart was there, but it was! And they were convinced by that somehow. They gave me their blessing to leave school and try it out.

You're playing in Australia at two of my favourite venues, Oxford Art Factory in Sydney and Night Cat in Melbourne, they both have such an atmosphere. With your live shows, do you genuinely feed off that kind of intimacy, when you can go eyeball to eyeball with people while they're dancing and singing your songs back at you?
I love that shit. I come from that world of just playing these really sweaty Brooklyn shows as much as I could when I was 19, 20 and it was the scariest thing ever. I think those shows are the most scary, because it’s just so intimate. My first show ever was the Bowery Electric and it was, literally, like three people in the crowd, and that was one of the most scariest shows I've ever played. I continued to play locally and people started to show out more often, and I found that, weirdly, the bigger the venues got the less nervous I was.

There's something really thrilling about the high of an intimate show. I've also played bigger college festivals where there's a barricade between you and the audience, and obviously that is a different type of show where it's more of a performance in that sense, you have to emote on a grander scale. With something more intimate, it always feels like I'm bearing my soul to these people, and they are kind enough to be there and accept that vulnerability. Who knows what types of venues I'll eventually be playing, but I think I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for very intimate shows.

TRENCH TOUR AUSTRALIA 2025 - Tickets on sale now
10 August - Oxford Art Factory, Sydney
12 August - The Night Cat, Melbourne

TRENCH is out now via Arista Records. You can download and stream here
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