Towa Bird is rewriting the code

For two years, it stayed there. Bird was out touring — on bills with both Billie Eilish and her now girlfriend Renée Rapp — and focusing on her live show, working through an intense schedule on the road. In those long stretches, she’s entirely in her body, dialled in on delivering the best set possible, and trying to hold the attention of a crowd that’s often technically shown up for someone else. This isn’t the space, Bird tells me, where she does her best writing. When she was finally off the road, she found the time and space to get back into her own head. As it turned out, she realised she had a lot to say.

“When it did come to that time, I was like, ‘Oh, no, this is needed,’” Bird says of finally getting back in the studio. On 15 May, she’ll release her second record, Gentleman. It’s markedly more mature than its predecessor, her 2024 debut American Hero, leaning into confidence and poise where the first album often played it coy. 

The now 27-year-old Bird got her start in music in her late teens as the Internet’s favourite guitarist, coming up on TikTok with expressive shredding covers of trending songs. Born in Hong Kong and raised between there, Thailand, and London by British and Filipino parents, she started playing guitar in her early teens. She grew up on a diet of greats such as Jimi Hendrix and Pink Floyd, determined to be the next great guitar god. In London she studied at Goldsmiths but dropped out after two years as her profile started to grow online. Music, it was quickly becoming clear, was a tangible career path now open to her — and she moved to U.S. to pursue that dream.

Bird's family is still spread out across London and Hong Kong, though she says her near-nomadic upbringing prepared her well to handle the hyper-independence she’s now required to have. She makes semi-frequent trips to London to see her sister, a city she says she loves and often contemplates moving back to.

Even as Bird’s early stateside career started to take off, that vision didn’t at first include her working alone. “Only at 21 did I allow myself to actually consider myself a solo artist,” she recalls. 

Part of this was her own training. Guitar, she tells me, was always her main medium of expression and so becoming a guitarist was just the next step. But part of it was cultural, too. That, she says, was a realisation she only landed on after moving to America: "What I’ve noticed living in this country is what’s put into the water here is that whatever you want or dream, you can do. That was not the culture I grew up in,” she tells me. 

The individualism of the U.S. couldn’t be a farther cry from the tall poppy syndrome that often pervades Commonwealth culture. While for some, the hustle of America can be jarring, it was for Bird somewhat motivating: “Honestly, there’s so much of that that I envy, because I could have started my artist project way sooner. … I never even had that thought,” she says. With permission to put her own creative vision in the driver’s seat, she finally feels like she’s got a solid grip on what she wants to say: “When I first started American Hero, I was, like… 21, 22,” she says. “So, your brain is like a sponge. That’s so young still. And even the average age of a pop star or musician — it’s so young. Trying to write my second album at 25, 26, it feels like I’ve still got so much more growing to do, but there’s also [been] tangible growth."

As Bird stepped into that growth and started to write about it, she finally came back to the word “gentleman,” embracing fully the archetype she’s always wanted to embody. Much of Bird’s brand is, of course, unabashedly queer. She grew up dressing masculinely, and always preferred wearing men’s clothes. When she was first gaining traction online, much of what audiences identified with was her willingness to lean into her masculinity comfortably while still refusing to let it define her entirely. Playing with the label “gentleman,” she explains, is just a further iteration of her exploration of androgyny and unwillingness to conform.

“I relate to the word in a weird sort of way, particularly in a queer way,” Bird tells me. “There are the two parts of the word, gentle and man, that create this feminisation of masculinity.” 

The cover art for Gentleman illustrates this explicitly: Bird is depicted twice as conjoined twins sharing a suit. They look almost identical — one earnest and soft, with bouncing curls and a lapel flower, which the other is cocky and confident, hair slicked back and chin turned up. “It’s supposed to be two sides of the same coin,” she tells me. They’re both the two different versions of herself—one vulnerable, the other a “confident little shit”—and the two sides of “the gentleman.” 

This kind of witty deconstruction and subversion is central to the new record as a whole. Both the songs and the creative serve as vessels for Bird to explore and extend the varied facets of her identity and expression. Here, fashion and personal style were both huge touchpoints. When she hasn’t been in the studio, Bird has also been spending major chunks of her off-road time modelling, giving her both a huge respect for the craft and an updated palette to play with. 

“Queer people are always at the front," Bird says. “I feel like we’re going to watch this cyclical thing happen where lesbians are wearing fine tailoring and suits and ties and paying attention to those details like colour matching and things like that. And then you’re going to watch cis men slowly catch up.”

The spotlight on the dapper lesbian has been picking up steam over the last few years, with the likes of Cosmopolitan’s Willa Bennett and MUNA’s Naomi McPherson and Jo Maskin. Well before the idea for Gentleman even fully formed, for example, Bird appeared in the video for Lucy Dacus’s “Best Guess” alongside a slate of other infamous lesbians and masc-presenting folks, an ode to the dapper masc, a figure long overlooked and long misunderstood. 

Perhaps it was a bit of foreshadowing, but for Bird, it was also just a ridiculously fun day on set with her friends. “It was very wholesome. I kept forgetting that we actually had something to do and an objective,” she says. “Weirdly enough, I have such a huge queer friend group. There’s literally 12 or 13 of us. So, at this point, being in a room full of gay people is not new. Being on that music video was obviously so special, but it also feels wonderfully familiar in a way.”

That friend group, Bird says, coalesced right around the time of her L.A. move. Despite still being the place where she found motivation and a desire to push her limits, she also recognised the cutthroat nature of the city’s scene. “Even if we speak the same language and sometimes even in the same accent, the communication is quite different,” Bird says. “Weirdly enough, I had to learn how to speak American.”

“It’s hard for me to tell what’s American culture versus what is music industry culture, because as I moved here, my career started,” she says. “L.A. can be very tricky to navigate for sure. I’m getting to this stage in my life where I’m like… Maybe I need to be more discerning about the people that I spend time with.” Finding the right friends thus became an incredibly important crutch in navigating that transition. With them, she can just be who she is — yes, confident and witty, but also sometimes quiet and vulnerable, too — without any editing. “When I’m not in that space, I definitely feel like I’m holding back a little bit, whether that’s sense of humour or even conversation topics," Bird tells me. "I’m kind of moulding myself into something that feels suitable for them. With my friends, I don’t have to do that at all.”

To hear that Bird ever feels like she has to hold back is admittedly surprising. She coyly acknowledges she knows she’s often perceived as the Internet’s resident “hot guitar masc.” Sometimes, she says earnestly, the label can feel limiting, but most of the time, she’s happy to be a vessel for that kind of confidence. Bird recognises that when she can embody that kind of brazen directness — whether in dress, attitude, or  willingness to express desire — she can empower others to find that within themselves as well.

Boldness is, indeed, all over Gentleman. On “Dog,” Bird opines (by way of a Stooges reference) about being so down bad for someone that she’d do anything to submit to them. Elsewhere, she indulges in sultry half-speak drawls and long guitar solos. “I grew up on that… So, doing the big guitar solos over a string section feels like the remnants of that,” she admits.

At least in mainstream pop music — which is, for now, the world Bird is working in — the Guitar Hero-style shred hasn’t had its moment in the sun in a while. It’s something Bird says she hopes to bring back and if Gentleman is all about Bird stepping confidently into herself, embracing the “guitarist” label is clearly part of that, too.

“When I look at the people who I grew up with, a lot of the singers were also instrumentalists. I find that in this day and age in the pop sphere, there’s a more heavy emphasis on songwriting and performance," she explains. “A lot of people in the pop sphere are, like, amazing dancers. But if you look at the people who I grew up on — Hendrix, The Beatles, Pink Floyd — they’re not.”

“I mean, I would consider myself to be a musician before I would consider myself an artist,” she continues. “When I think of a musician, I think you’re kind of an extension of your instrument. You’re sort of a vessel for the instrument, whether that be your voice or your guitar or whatever you play. I feel like an artist is sort of… It seems to be more standalone.”

While Bird acknowledges there were periods early on in her solo-act journey where she wanted to transcend that attachment to her instrument, she now recognises it as one of her greatest strengths. And, it’s also just truest to who she is. 

So many of the songs on the record came to life either as or out of jam sessions with producer Patrick Wimberly: “To be honest, a lot of these songs were Patrick pushing me to make a song that feels good rather than a song that makes sense,”  she tells me. 

The pair worked on the album in bicoastal bursts. Wimberly operates out of a studio in Brooklyn, which Bird would fly out to every few weeks to do “intensives.” “We were kind of in this long distance relationship for about a year. And honestly, it was really nice,” Bird jokes. In her off time, she could play with ideas and instrumentals and by the time she got to New York, she had a slew of new material to show off to Wimberly, and they could cut out the fluff quickly. “It’s nice to have it blocked out rather than just being in the studio for a whole month and getting stuff that doesn’t feel as intentional,” she says. 

“He’s one of the only producers I’ve ever worked with who’s not precious at all about their ideas,” Bird recalls. “I don’t even know how he detaches in that way—it’s so healthy. Sometimes, we’ll work on something for a whole day, and I’ll tell Patrick I’m not sure if I love it, and he’ll be like, ‘Okay, we’ll just delete it.’” 

Wimberly also helped her think bigger for this record than she ever thought possible. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “All Gone,” where the pair brought in Kathleen Hanna for a feature. “When Patrick and I would send back and forth our reference playlists, it would basically just be ‘Deceptacon',” she says. “When we were thinking about who was going to be a feature on this record, I was thinking it would be cool to get an artist of a similar size to me. I was fishing in my own pool, basically. And Patrick was like, ‘What if we got a legend.’” 

Bird wasn’t at all convinced that it would work. Maybe, she suggests, it was just another case of tall poppy syndrome again, but in any case, she agreed to at least try. Hanna was first on their list and to nearly everyone’s surprise, shortly after reaching out, she said yes.

Few other people than Hanna, Bird says, could get many recording techs and industry veterans starstruck but when she came into the studio, nobody quite knew what to do with themselves. “We were all like… We didn’t know what to say. We were like: ‘Do we look at you? What should we do here? What should we do now’” Bird jokes.

“She’s so much fun,” Bird says of finally recording with her. “On the day that we finished the song, she was in the booth doing her verse and then we were editing it outside, and she was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do my taxes.’ She’s so nice to be around, because it’s just, like, life on Kathleen’s terms. She’s so refreshing.”

It was, ultimately, yet another dream realised. And it’s perhaps the perfect encapsulation of what recording this album means to Bird. In more ways than one, Gentleman is the realisation of inner child prophecies finally coming true.