Chanpan creates a fiery, futuristic sound of liberation
With culture and community at their foundation, the New York-based musical trio is primed for world domination
Chanpan may only have four songs out at the moment, but they're poised for world domination.
Esther Kim
Words by Andre Lawes Menchavez
Just two years ago, Grace Dumdaw and twins Lance Tran and Matthew Tran were busking to city passerbyers in New York City’s Chinatown. Today, the band—now named Chanpan—are four fiery genre-expansive songs deep into their world domination and fresh off a sold-out debut headlining show last week.
Chanpan is a combination of the Chinese pronunciation of Lance and Matthew's surname 陳 and part of Dumdaw’s Kachin name Seng Hkam Pan. The band all came from immigrant working class families, with the Tran twins hailing from Missouri and Dumdaw from Louisiana, and are now all based in New York City. The foundation of Chanpan formed over their shared upbringing, including the mutual experience of working in their family’s restaurants in middle America, and also, their united passion in community organizing.
The Tran twins are the instrumentalists of the group, with Dumdaw providing the vocals on their tracks.
The band released their debut single, “jungle,” in September 2023, and their second single, “ooweeooweeoo” last March. Their singles are about to reach half a million streams on Spotify, all within a year since the release. And notably, the trio became an iconic viral hit due to their music promo in New York City that’s been viewed more than eight million times.
Continuing their success, they released their two newest singles, “air ride” and “❥attack”, last Friday. The band swiftly went from self-producing demos to working with big industry producers. Chanpan teamed up with Frankie Scoca, who’s worked with artists like NewJeans and V of BTS, to create the depressed baddie national anthem, “air ride.” And the situationship summer bop, “❥attack,” was produced with Bird Language, who has worked with artists like Hojean and Kevin Holliday.
In less than a year of releasing music and with only four songs in their repertoire, Chanpan has already managed to distinguish their unique sound and vision. While they’ve stated their list of influences from Yebba and Bjork to Radiohead and Led Zeppelin, Chanpan is laser-focused much less on following their musical inspirations, but rather creating a new sound of their own.
“The first record ['jungle'] has breakbeat drums and drum-and-bass producing, but also Lance brought in a bass line that's a nod to Herbie Hancock, and it's jazz, but there's also elements of punk and grunge in there, so it’s all sorts of stuff mixed together,” Matthew says. “But in terms of Chanpan overall, there is no mood board or artists we're trying to emulate. I think we really just want to be ourselves.”
Being themselves also means highlighting their individual cultural resilience and histories, making their songs somewhat of a soundtrack to what it feels like to pursue Asian liberation.
“I am from Myanmar, which is the home of the longest ongoing civil war in the world, and it’s a really big part of my identity,” Dumdaw says. “I came to America when I was 1 after being born in Burma, and I have stayed active in advocacy work for Kachin people since.”
“Chanpan would not exist without these broader, historic, systemic things,” Lance adds. “If the U.S. didn’t bomb Vietnam, our dad wouldn't have come as a refugee, we wouldn't exist here. If Myanmar wasn’t in a civil war and strife, Grace wouldn't have to have come here. We wouldn't have bonded over these shared things, like growing up in immigrant and refugee communities.”
Grace Dumdaw (center) and twins Lance Tran and Matthew Tran make up the band Chanpan.
Hill Coulson
In their debut single, “jungle,” the band used these histories of migration as one of their inspirations, setting the tone for their music by using the artform as a means of political activism in its own right—such as, using lyrics to give commentary on the conflict in Myanmar.
“Lyrics like ‘running through the crossfire in your head, surrounded by the ground we do not tread,’ are kind of about everything, the real war, the war in my head, the war where my people are dying, and the constant need to get them out of this ‘jungle,’ out of the internally displaced camps that they're in on the border of Burma, China and back home,” Dumdaw says. “Our own identities are absolutely a part of our identity as a band. Our background and our family struggles, it's all coming out of our music, because it's a way for us to talk about these things and give attention and platform these parts of our identities that we usually just don't address.”
“Chanpan is the way that we substantively think about who we are in our identities as Asian Americans, as a Kachin person, as Chinese Americans,” Matthew adds. “We're upfront about that and own that, and that's not a label that we're afraid of or reject.”
As Asian Americans in society are often lumped into a singular monolith that dictates how Asians are expected to act, look, or sound like, the same treatment can be seen with Asian artists in the industry. Chanpan, however, are fierce counters to the monolith culture. They’re unafraid to speak out about the issues they care about and make it very clear that they represent more than what the monolith says we are as Asian people.
“Asian American is an inherently political label that grew intentionally out of West Coast, third world liberation solidarity movements on college campuses,” Matthew says. “And now it's a weird thing in the music world and creative industry where we see we’re completely divorced from that.”
“Asian American is an inherently political label that grew intentionally out of West Coast, third world liberation solidarity movements on college campuses. And now it's a weird thing in the music world and creative industry where we see we’re completely divorced from that.”
“I am writing about being queer and non-binary, writing about war, and all of it is encapsulated in the lyrics of Chanpan’s music and the feeling of everything,” Dumdaw says. “There is a need for representation and a need for championing my people, being a voice, and using my platform and writing about my experiences in these songs.”
When asked about their hopes for the future, Chanpan shared one of their dreams for their music—that someone will listen to their discography 100 years from now and that their songs would convey “what it felt like to be a young person at the beginning of the end of the world.”
“I want people in the future to see the struggles that we had interpersonally, and also with society, and what we had imagined for ourselves,” Dumdaw says. “There’s a lot of Chanpan music that isn't out yet, but a lot of our lyrics are in that world…we want 100 years from now, for people to listen to Chanpan’s music and understand that these are all things that we were aware of, thought of, dreamt about, and struggled with.”
Chanpan is a combination of the Chinese pronunciation of Lance and Matthew Tran's surname and part of Grace Dumdaw’s Kachin name Seng Hkam Pan.
Grace Dumdaw
It’s exciting to watch the rise of a musical group that is made up of three incredible artists who have devoted their time to fighting for the community, who have started their musical careers as a band playing music for their local community, and are now igniting conversations through their art in honor of community.
Chanpan’s sound, image, and spirit transcends beyond what’s expected, making them exactly what the future of not only Asian representation needs, but something long overdue in the industry as a whole.
“I think this clean-cut, shiny, ameliorated Asian person that lives in the minds of Americans, is just not realistic,” Dumdaw says. “I want young Asian people to realize that you can be anything that you want to be, and only you decide that. I want young Asian people to look back at our ancestors, at what they were doing and how free they were living, and know that we should get back to that. And I think that's a big driving force of Chanpan as a music group.”
“In immigrant communities especially, there’s this idea of respectability, safety, conformation, and climbing a ladder, and I think Chanpan have all in our lives very much rejected all of that,” Lance adds. “There’s the idea that assimilation is a good thing and we reject that notion, and we reject Asian American monolith culture. Chanpan is trying to push through all of that.”
Twins Lance and Matthew Tran, and Grace Dumdaw formed Chanpan—in part—over their shared upbringing.
Amy Petralia
Published on July 25, 2024