By Katie Li

April 7th 2025

Suburban Massachusetts, its east-west split between blue collar and white collar, its geography cataloged somewhat architecturally in line with her current day job at an architectural firm—the now London-based Helen Sun recalls growing up there with the same vividness her songs carry, even years later. 

Rather subversively, she began her musical journey begging her parents for piano lessons, showed prodigy-level promise, then quit after a string of dubious teachers: one limited her to strictly Disney, another corrected mistakes with the edge of a ruler. In its place, flute served as a fleeting replacement, a sound she half-seriously quips might sneak back into her music, before finding the jazz guitar: where most of her songs start today. And with her tri-wielding of instruments came a natural taste for musical eclecticism: Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, Magnetic Fields, Prince, Car Seat Headrest, Fiona Apple, Xiu Xiu, Broken Social Scene. And by 17, she was making her own music, likening its original sound to a sort of “suburban angst.” But along with her self-imposed desire for anonymity, college in New York City put her music on pause: two jobs, two majors, and a dingy cockroach-ridden apartment replete with a questionable landlord.

A summer magazine internship in Berlin falls through—quietly, absurdly, almost cinematically. It would take that improbably kismet break in that unrelenting momentum for her to find, for the first time in years, a sudden surplus of time to let music back in. When Helen returns, the sound is already fully formed and it’s distinct with faint traces of her earliest influences: delivered with the vulnerability of Adrienne Lenker, set adrift in an ambient haze reminiscent of Feel Good Lost-era Broken Social Scene. It’s intimate but not immediate, soft around the edges, as if everything—voice, synth, guitar—blurred into one another. Despite that clarity of vision, her catalog remains sparse: just one debut single, “big proverb,” before her release of her 5-track debut EP, talk with your Teeth, almost two years later. “big proverb,” her debut single and solo track, reads like the thesis to her music: vocal delivery emotionally distant, elements bleeding together both loose structurally and instrumentally with a dreamy stream-of-consciousness and a lack of a clear sonic centerpiece that feels ambient in ethos.

Released last December, talk with your Teeth is both a reckoning and a reclamation: seventeen distilled into sound, a return from the psych ward, a tentative first stand behind her own conviction. Rather than an introductory declaration of self, the debut lingers more like an ending—the final traces of the turbulent chapter she lived through at 17. talk with your Teeth arrives suspended in a strange duality: both an ending and a beginning. “17 felt like a rebirth of myself into who I am now,” she says, recalling the era where she first began making music, compulsively, evasively, and in obscurity on her firewall-bypassed school computer. “I wanted to finish what I started when I was that age and really close the book on this sort of very tumultuous time,” she explains. “And now, after the EP, I can start making the music of who I am now.”

That paradox—rebirth as an ending—carries into the music itself. In her blend of indie, ambient, and breakbeat, she resists clarity in favor of the intimately introspective sound she’s come to describe simply as “Helen music,” reclaiming both the eras and the genres that inform the record. There’s a kind of closeness that once felt almost untenable; when she first began releasing songs at 17 under one of her three alter aliases, even a passing “I like this song” was enough to make her recoil, eventually wiping her entire catalog (completely… I checked) to avoid being perceived at all. Now, those same impulses remain, but are refined: contained, assured, and finally, let go. 

“It’s Like”: The record opens with “It’s Like”, its most traditionally indie-leaning track. Vocals begin spatially remote before balancing above a guitar line that evokes Humbug-era Arctic Monkeys, with the wistful melancholy of Varsity’s “So Sad, So Sad”— appropriately high-school-anthem territory for many. Acoustic and electronic still vaguely collide here: guitar and voice sit atop the breakbeat drum pattern that scores the entire EP.

“Shiny Kindness”: Helen Sun’s breakout track, began in Berlin with just vocals and drums, later finished in one Notes-app-fueled session after her London move.  it’s the first demo she’s ever proudly shared with her Teeth, she tells me. Its video matches the song’s dreamy texture: Helen wandering through football fields, showers, graffiti-laden streets, before glitch overlays and double-exposed zebra footage tilt everything toward the surreal.

“You Idiot”: It’s barely ninety seconds, yet it’s the EP’s most ambient moment. Guitar picking and a vocal sample so reverb-drenched I barely catch that it’s in Chinese—a voice note from her father—kick off the track. The repeated line, “Don’t be dumb, you idiot, you piece of shit, please shut up,” lands with teasing endearment rather than cruelty, a small, strange humor threading through the vulnerability.

“Maybe”: is where I first placed a familiar vocal delivery, the easy confidence of half-spoken Mallrat. Lyrically, it offers her clearest insight into the EP’s seventeen-year-old perspective: “Last week I was seventeen, it gets the best of me. Driving down I93, I never felt so free.”

“A Melody, a Lie”: The EP closes with its most stripped-down, emotionally raw track. An abrupt beat switch dissolves into ambient textures, tinged with calls to George Clanton-esque vaporwave. Here, Helen’s vocals are at their clearest and most assured, a perfect conclusion to the project, as she finally Talks with an unmistakable conviction. 

The EP’s title captures that balance so perfectly it extends to the capitalization of the words: talk with your Teeth. “The concept of teeth to me is very kind of strong and aggressive. …sometimes you don’t have the conviction yet so it’s a bit of a muted talk”, she explains, “but you’re right on this line between being bold enough to say something with your teeth and being still not fully confident.... Even if you feel insecure, you’re doing it,” she explains. That tension—assertion tinged with uncertainty—courses through each track, impressively capturing the fragile power of her self reclaimed in a just 11-minute runtime. 

But talk with your Teeth is only the opening gesture of Helen Sun’s musical world—or the ending of another one, depending on how you look at it. She’s moving forward without much of a rigid blueprint except a rough sketch of this month and the next: a DJ set in Berlin, followed by her live debut in London and, then, Paris, and plans to release two new singles. After reclaiming the rawness of seventeen, Helen Sun is poised to step into her present self, Teeth finally bared.

Read my full conversation with Helen Sun below.

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Helen Sun’s Recent Favorites:

An impulse purchase:

“Some expensive magnesium glycinate.”

“‘The Butcher’ by Final Fantasy.”

“I haven't watched that many movies recently. ‘Bugonia’ was the last movie I watched. I don't know if it was a favorite, but it's the most recent thing I watched.

How was your weekend? 

My weekend was good. I went to a gig yesterday with my friend Oliver. I got there and I was like, "I don't know anyone who's playing," and there was no one there. And then we ate a pizza and talked. I think that the doorman was side-eyeing me a bit because they gave me the name of someone else to use that was on the guest list because I decided to come too late. And then I get there and I was like,"My name's Sophia." And then he puts it in and it's not there. And then I had to look at my phone. And I was like, "Sophia with an F." [laughs]. They kinda gave me shit for it. And then, today, I walked around Hampstead Heath with my friend Olivia. But it was raining a bit. And then we had pasta. Then I went grocery shopping and came home. It was a nice day.

I love Sundays for that. It's my favorite day of the week.

I feel like it's a nice chill day to do whatever. But I also feel like if I don't do something, like a specific activity, then I go back to work and I'm like, "Fuck, I didn't do anything." 

Are you feeling that at all right now? The Sunday scaries?

Yeah. I started getting stress rashes this year and it's not even like my job is bad. Like I have a really nice boss and I like the firm. But I still get the stress rashes.

So you're based in London right now, but are you from there? 

I'm from Massachusetts. 

Oh, no way! Okay, northeast. You have a little bit of an accent, when did you move out there?

Really? I moved there seven months ago [laughs]. 

I could be tweaking. But I swear, would not have guessed Massachusetts.

That's so funny. Sometimes when I’m around British people, I can just pick it up and just start parodying. But I think around Americans, I usually sound more American. 

Maybe you'll become more American as we speak.Did you move out there for work?

I came because I just really liked London. I visited when I was studying abroad. I liked that the museums are free. And the music that kind of collects around London. I went to uni in New York. But my last semester, I was also working two jobs on top of two majors. So I wasn't sleeping and I was kind of losing my mind. I was living in the dingiest sublease with cockroaches and a hoarder landlord who lived below. So I was like, ‘I fucking need to leave.’ 

Wow, we just barely missed you in New York. And you studied architecture? 

I specialized in architectural history and then I did comparative literature. 

Very cool. But you grew up in Massachusetts, were you near the city at all?

It was very suburban. An average suburban town, like eight miles west of Boston. It's just… nothing happens there yet it feels insane at the same time. I think it was also hard moving there as a kid, when I grew up in a really Brazilian/diverse small city beforehand. I was the only Asian kid in my class when I moved, which is a bit of an anomaly for Massachusetts.

Do you feel like where you're from in Massachusetts has an impact on your music or sound in any way? 

I think so. Especially in high school when I first started making music, it definitely sounded a lot more suburban. Suburban angst. Same town as Jonathan Richman.

[Laughs] I need to hear it ‘cause I don’t know if I can imagine that. 

I actually can't. I was actually trying to look for it recently but it’s gone. Our school had some experimental funding from the state to give everyone a MacBook Air in my year. But, I remember I was like, ‘I want to make music’ but they didn’t have anything for that. I had a friend who stole IT passwords from our school, went into the tech guy’s desk and took a photo of them all. So he gave them to me and then I torrented a bunch of stuff like Logic. So I was just making music that way. 

I released some songs [on BandCamp] and it was quite fun. But I was so insecure at the time and just being perceived made me so uncomfortable. Even simple DMs that were like, “I like this song.” I was like, “I need to delete it now. No one's supposed to listen to it, even though I put it on Bandcamp.” So, I deleted everything at one point. When I graduated, I didn't back anything up. And then they took the computer back obviously, and they were kind of mad at me. They were like, you were doing unsolicited stuff on this computer. But it was like I already graduated, what could they do? And then they just wiped it, so I literally can't find it. It's like nowhere, it's just gone.

What a shame. I'd love to hear it. Maybe one of those people who DM’d you saved a copy. [Hit us up if you’re seeing this!]

Sometimes, I think I make it way better in my head than it was. It was very guitar-based, more that indie kind of route. I didn't really know how to produce drums so they sounded very stock Logic. 

Was that under the name Helen Sun as well?

I had like three different names. I don't even want to say them. I mean honestly, I'm sure someone has a copy… 

You’ve said your debut EP, talk with your Teeth, kind of aimed to reference that era of making music at 17. What is it specifically about 17 for you?

When I was 17, I was in a psych ward for a bit. It was the tail end of 16 when I went, like 16 into 17. So then 17 really felt like I turned 17 and I'm back from the psych ward and into high school and what the fuck. I think at school, it was so big, so I don't think anyone really cared. It wasn't like a small school where everyone knows everything. But there was a little bit of a rumor mill around where I disappeared to. Someone said they thought I moved to Tokyo to become a model. And then, it was just kind of being like, “well actually fuck all of you guys. I don't care about you, like, Ben Shapiro glazer boys and what you think of me. I'm gonna do what I want!”

I was really able to just drive and I was going to the city a lot more, making different friends. So it was like leaving the suburbs behind and leaving behind my mental illness like rebirthing myself. 17 felt like a rebirth of myself into who I am now.

Also, a lot of the earlier music I was making was then, when I was really making music every day. But during university, I stopped ‘cause I had to work through all of uni on top of classes. So then I had no time to. So I felt like once I finished uni and I left my stupid cockroach apartment, I wanted to finish what I started when I was that age and really close the book on this sort of very tumultuous time. And now, after the EP, I can start making the music of who I am now.

Wow, what a crazy beautiful backstory to the EP. I don't know if this is like a microscopic detail, but I noticed in the punctuation of its title, it’s just the T in teeth that’s capital. Was there a hidden intention behind that?

The concept of teeth to me is very kind of strong and aggressive. They’re very powerful bones that you have. And sometimes when you talk, maybe you don't have the conviction or the confidence in yourself yet so it's a bit of a muted talk. And you're kind of right on this line between being bold enough to say something with your teeth, and being still not fully confident and strong enough to say something. But you're there, you're doing it for the first time and you're standing behind what you're saying. Even if you feel insecure doing something, you’re doing it. 

So you did have that intention down to the capitalization. Very cool, very subliminal.

Yeah I didn't think anyone would notice it actually.

Do you feel like that with your music process? Do you feel like most everything is planned very intentionally or do you find a lot of accidents make its way into the final product? 

I can be really quite picky and specific about my music, but I think the way I make it kind of starts by just being like “I'm gonna play my guitar now” or maybe my synthesizer, whatever. I’m kind of quite rigorous about how I build and finish a song but then I also do really love how, in these older songs especially, they keep in the mistakes. Like when they yell ‘fuck’ and then, they start the song. I always really loved that and that's something that I try to keep a bit, to make things a bit messy. 

Yeah, I totally see that with your music. What comes to mind is the intro of “Shiny Kindness,” that guitar feedback that kind of gates in and out before dropping into its main motif. Can you set the scene for that song’s writing process, whether your mood when you were writing it, your references, how you wanted it to feel, etc.? 

It started when I was living in Berlin. I was there when I started making music again 'cause I finally had a room to myself, just a sublet for the summer. It was the first time in years I hadn't had a job, doing nothing and playing the guitar a bunch. And there was this Adrienne Lenker song that I really liked. The actual “Shiny Kindness” song doesn't really sound like that song at all, but it was the tuning that she had from this song. I was just playing that song in my room because I really like it. Then I picked up the guitar the next day, and was a bit too lazy to change the tuning back into standard, so I just went with playing on that. I wasn't really so familiar with the tuning, so I really just doodled my way into that song, into the guitar portion of it.

I had a lot of demos up at that point, but it was the first demo I had where I was like, "I have something.” My young woman tribute to David Berman really. My friends were always like, "So can we hear some of the music that you're always working on?" Every other demo, I was like, "No." But this one, I was like, "Yeah." I pulled it out of my laptop and played when it was just guitar and some drum break I sampled from online and that was it. I was like “yeah” [smugly].

I went back to New York for a semester to finish uni and then right after I graduated, I came to visit London. My friend/collaborator Hank Underwood was living here at the time and then I showed him this song and then he was like fire, let’s do something. So, we kind of sat in his dorm room and then really just worked it out that day. All the lyrics, it was just like Notes app, one take, and it came together really quite quickly. Normally, I have a lot of demos and they just sit on my computer.

Yeah, I was listening to your NTS radio set and I saw you had dropped two demos on it. 

On that NTS set, some of the songs that I downloaded onto my USB just didn't process correctly. I was 40 minutes in and I was like “oh my fucking god, I have no songs.” And then I thought, “Wait, I have some random shit.” That’s why there's no transitions in the last 20 minutes of this set. I looked at my laptop and I was trying to find every WAV file I have. And one of them was like such an old demo. The other song was gonna end and so I just hit play [laughs]. It was an accident that I had to do.

That's awesome though. Do you think any of those old demos will ever be finished and dropped?

I think… I've been working on a lot of new demos, and I just have better ideas. I'm working on music now and I'll release two songs in about a month. I think May 1st I said. So I'm excited for that. They're more like me now and not teenager me. 

When you're saying like you now versus teenage you, are you different lyrically, content, or sound wise? 

I don't know. I just feel like now, my mental and my objective are a bit different. What I want to say is a bit different. But I don't know how much it will end up seeming different to other people. 

That’s awesome. So guitar and synths are your main instruments? Is that how you got started in music?

I started playing the piano when I was a kid. I begged my parents to let me play the piano. They were broke at the time but they found one on the street, a Yamaha keyboard, so they gave it to me. I really loved the piano so much and eventually I got to take lessons with this piano teacher who I really loved. This guy, Alberto. He was Italian, but then he moved to China. Then my parents were trying to find me a new piano teacher. Alberto was always like, "What do you want to learn?" At the time I was kind of that annoying Asian girl prodigy at piano. I had some gold certificate or something.

So when my parents were trying to find someone, there were two piano teachers that we tried. One of them was this woman in her basement, and all she wanted to do was play Disney songs, sing Disney music. And the other guy was this really intense old Chinese guy who would use a ruler on me. So I was like, I don't want to play the piano anymore. I think my parents were quite like liberal Asian parents. They were like, do whatever you want to do.

And then after I stopped playing the piano, I was like 13 and my passion was to become a jazz guitarist. Like I just discovered jazz chords through King Krule and thought I needed to learn it. So I took all these jazz guitar lessons through high school. I played flute actually too from fourth grade to eighth grade. I can still play it. It’s not on any of my songs, but I was thinking about incorporating it.

No, I could totally hear it. I feel like there's like some sneaky flute in a lot of random, unassuming songs.

For sure. I really do love the piano, but I think I just feel much more comfortable with the guitar now. 

Have you ever played live? Or with a band before? 

Not yet. I'm playing live April 17th and May 2nd. I played live a few times in high school, but not my music. It was me playing jazz guitar at a cafe. Really different vibe. It was me in the corner and this old guy Chad, who I took my guitar lessons with. Turns out he was my mom’s old boss’ husband. We would hang out every week and he would always send me music. So I'd listen to a lot of music from him.

Very exciting. How are you feeling about playing live the first time soon? 

I can be such an anxious person, which is why I really need to practice everything down. I don't know what to look at when I'm performing. But you'll see, we'll see. I was thinking, do I get tipsy before? I mean, that is the obvious solution in my head. 

Or you can do what they always say, imagine everyone naked. 

Naked, yeah. [Laughs] I did a DJ set a couple weeks ago. And I couldn't do it. Every time I looked up and someone was looking at me, I was like—[whips head dramatically back down]. But I had fun, and I wasn't that anxious. 

Is that set anywhere that we can find?

No, it was a really kind of pretentious place. No phones. And they had this custom speaker system that cost them £500,000. It was a good, interesting place, but I don't think they’d invite me back. It was a four hour set, so I only downloaded so many songs onto my USB stick. So I got up and was like, “well, I just have to go with what I have.” So I did not stick to a single genre. I'd play Broken Social Scene and then it would transition to Young Nudy. And then people would come up to me and they'd be like, “I've never heard something like this before!”

That still sounds awesome though, very diverse, very perfect for ADHD. I feel like the mixes I listened to of yours were also pretty genre-diverse as well. What artists did you listen to growing up?

I think I've always listened to everything. I really liked the Magnetic Fields when I was in high school. Broken Social Scene. I didn't have Spotify, or even a cell phone plan for the longest time so I was kind of like raw-dogging life with an iPod Touch and a Google text number. There was this old CD shop in my town, and I remember buying this Jimi Hendrix CD and a Nina Simone CD. So I was really just driving around, listening to the same two albums, over and over and over. I knew them so well. Can I look?

Of course. It is such a tough question, I had to make a list on the Notes app in case of an emergency.

That’s smart. I have a playlist here that's just called 2019. Prince, Car Seat Headrest, Fiona Apple, Xiu Xiu. And, now, I've been listening to a lot of Owen Pallett and Astrid Sonne. Owen Pallett has a full album called He Poos Clouds, where eight out of ten songs are based off of Dungeons and Dragons and it's really good. Also the music he was making under his first moniker called Final Fantasy.

Another loaded question, but how do you describe your music—whether genre-wise or not?

Helen music.

Any dream collabs?

Maybe Astrid Sonne. So many dream collabs really.

What’s next for Helen Sun? I know you said two new songs coming out soon, so maybe those are the main focus for now? 

I think so. I don't really have too rigid of a plan. But right now, I'm really concentrating until May 1st. I'm playing three shows and then releasing two singles. The first show is a DJ set in Berlin. And then for live shows, there’s one in London and one in Paris. I think I'm bringing the guitar for those, which will be really good.