Deb Fan’s haunting new album is about belonging nowhere and everywhere

Duality might be the overarching theme of Kowloon Demos. Drawing from the eponymous Hong Kong area’s intriguing history, as well as its depictions in film—where antagonism between police and triads often concludes in subverted hero tropes—Fan crafts an introspective body of work that seeks to explore moral ambiguity. Her thesis is underlined in “Closer to Hell,” a “classically inspired” track influenced by philosophical conversations with her father and developed from Fan’s tentative experimentations playing the guitar. Attributing its nihilistic tone to her own nature, the musician describes the song as “on-the-nose” regarding the EP’s concept. “I love concepts revolving around good versus evil,” she admits.

The classical inspiration that shows up in her work is born from Fan’s own training, which spans years in the double digits. “[It’s] pretty obvious, I feel like, every Asian kid was enrolled in piano lessons,” she muses. Through her parents’ incentive, Fan attended an array of music classes growing up, including piano, trumpet, and classical singing, whose effect on vocal placement lingers in her music today. Though her personal definition of her sound centers R&B and soul with traces of rock influence, jazz flourishes abound, hinting at her time in jazz band while still in school. “I was so close to music my entire life,” shares the multi-instrumentalist. “It started off as a hobby first, just because it wasn’t something that people where I came from typically pursued—music wasn’t anything that was meant to be taken seriously. So I kind of just went towards the school route. When I graduated high school and moved out of Hong Kong, my passion for music actually started to develop.”

Deb Fan, who grew up in Hong Kong, immigrated to the United States at 18.

Breanna Lynn

In college, Fan would spend a lot of her extracurricular time singing, which she seemed to enjoy heaps more than her chemistry major, thus shifting her focus. As a result, she ended up transferring to music school, where she familiarized herself with all aspects of music technology, from production, to engineering and sound design. “Everything to do with music engineering I wanted to get my hands on, because I knew that was where music was headed towards at the time,” the Los Angeles-based artist explains. Even though Fan had started out as a performer through her friction with musical instruments, creating her own material prioritized production in beginner stages. “I used to rely on the production to tell the story,” she says of her earlier work, up until her debut six-piece project Gemini Moon released last year.

Her debut single, “Relapse,” released in 2021, marked a turning point for the musician, who at that point, had started introducing songwriting into her process. The track came about by way of collaboration with a friend in music school, where the two bonded over their shared music taste and desire to “just make a song.” “We weren’t exceptional at the program, or [making] music, but our creativity was there. So even though it was a slower music-making process, our ideas were sharp and it was cool. I kind of just threw things at a canvas [to] see what comes out of it,” Fan remarks, adding that she “didn’t know anything about releasing [songs]” at the time. Yet, putting out “Relapse” served a purpose beyond propelling her career forward. “I was going through such a lonely period. So it was definitely very cathartic to release that track.”

A couple of subsequent single runs, interjected by the unveiling of her production-heavy first EP, landed the singer a notable breakthrough at the end of last year, when she joined forces with Congolese Canadian rapper jev. for the groovy track “9AM IN LONDON.” The first half of 2024 saw the successive drops of “Lady” and “Closer to Hell,” in May and June respectively, in the lead-up to July’s Kowloon Demos, a record born out of the cultural push-and-pull Fan experienced in Hong Kong. “I [hadn’t] been back since Covid and, when I went back for the first time, I felt really foreign, in a way. I felt very disconnected,” the artist confesses. “I was in this little limbo where I felt like I didn’t really belong anywhere, but I belonged everywhere, and I wanted the project to reflect that.”