TikTok (ByteDance)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      On TikTok, Pop Music Speeds Up

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon MusicTikTok moves fast: the content stream is relentless and easy to scroll through, and music is often sped-up to accompany it. Listening to pop hits there can be disorienting — the music is familiar, but the pace can be unsettling. Seemingly endless remixes from the nightcore and plugg music scene help shape the sonic experience of the app.This movement is also creating a new class of hit. A sped-up version of Miguel’s “Sure Thing” became a staple on the app a couple of months ago, propelling the 12-year-old song to the Top 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 and to the top of the Billboard pop airplay chart. The Arizonatears Pluggnb Remix of Lil Uzi Vert’s “Watch This” hit the Hot 100 in February. Almost every artist of note has had their music sped up by a relatively anonymous producer and fed into the app.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about how TikTok reframes listening habits, what fast music achieves that regular-speed music can’t, how musicians are grappling with this new kind of (sometimes unsolicited) attention and how labels are already capitalizing on the trend.Guest:Elias Leight, senior music reporter at BillboardConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 113 Shares139 Views

      in Theater

      Catching Up With Hillary Clinton at “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’”

      by

      The former secretary of state celebrated the opening on Broadway and shared her thoughts on those drag show bans.On Sunday night, Hillary Clinton, fresh from attending the opening night of “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” on Broadway at the Music Box Theater, swept into the Rosevale Cocktail Room at the Civilian Hotel on West 48th Street.As candles flickered on tables, with miniature models from productions like “Hadestown” and “Dear Evan Hansen” displayed on a back wall, a few dozen guests at the private after-party sipped glasses of white wine from the bar. Mrs. Clinton mingled among guests including David Rockwell, the architect and Tony Award-winning show designer who designed the hotel; the actress Jane Krakowski; Huma Abedin, Mrs. Clinton’s longtime aide; and the “Dancin’” director, Wayne Cilento.“I loved it,” she told Mr. Cilento, who also danced in the original 1978 production of the show. “The dancers were so charismatic and magnetic. That energy was so needed.”Mrs. Clinton had attended the opening at the invitation of Rob Russo, a co-producer on the show who has worked with her in some capacity for nearly two decades. He hardly had to twist her arm, though: Mrs. Clinton, a noted Broadway superfan, has seen numerous shows in the past few months, including “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive” in July, “The Phantom of the Opera” in December and, last week, the new revival of “Some Like It Hot.”From left: Jamie DuMont, Nicole Fosse and Rob Russo. Mr. Russo, a co-producer of the show and a longtime associate of Mrs. Clinton’s, was the one to invite the former secretary of state to the show’s opening.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesSo when asked to consider the idea that a touring production of the latter show, in which two men dress as women to escape the mob, could be banned from playing in a state like Tennessee, which recently passed a law limiting “cabaret” shows, part of a wave of legislation across the country by conservative lawmakers against drag performances, Mrs. Clinton’s reaction was clear.“It’s a very sad commentary on what people think is important in our country,” Mrs. Clinton said. “I hope that it goes the way of the dinosaur because people will recognize that it’s just a political stunt.”The range of shows that could potentially be banned under such legislation — such as Shakespeare plays, in which a number of characters cross-dress; “Hairspray,” the popular musical in which the protagonist’s mother is usually played by a man in a dress; and “1776,” whose current touring company features an all-female, trans and nonbinary cast, was, she said, “absurd.”“I guess they’re going to shut the state borders to anything that is Shakespearean?” she said. “Are we going to stop exporting any kind of entertainment?”Ms. Fosse, far left, the daughter of the director-choreographer Bob Fosse, talked to a dancer in the show, Yeman Brown.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesAt around 9:10 p.m., Mrs. Clinton departed the party. Some guests followed her lead, while others moved upstairs to the Starchild Rooftop Bar & Lounge on the 27th floor, where Nicole Fosse — the daughter of the director-choreographer Bob Fosse and the actress Gwen Verdon — and Mr. Cilento, the director, were hosting a second party for the show’s creative team and cast of 22 dancers.The dancer Karli Dinardo wore a sleeveless silver gown with cutouts by the Australian designer Portia and Scarlett, while Yeman Brown donned a green Who Decides War cathedral sweatshirt with cutouts across the front. They sipped “Dancin’ Man” mocktails — roots divino bianco, cucumber, pink peppercorn and lemon-lime soda — and munched on “Fosse’s Breakfast” (granola) and shrimp cocktails furnished by waiters on silver platters. (For those with less highbrow tastes, there were also bags of M&M’s by the bar with the dancers’ names printed on them.)Karli Dinardo, a dancer in the show.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesKolton Krouse, who leads the number “Spring Chicken.”Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesKolton Krouse, a nonbinary dancer in the production whose face-slapping kicks earned a shout-out from the New York Times critic Jesse Green in his review, wore an asymmetrical black dress, gold heels, glittering gold eye shadow and bright red lipstick.“I wanted to do a modern take on Ann Reinking’s original trumpet solo dress,” they said of their sparkling one-shoulder gown.Mx. Krouse, who is among a cast of dancers that is noticeably more diverse in age, ethnicity, body type and gender presentation than a typical Fosse cast, said the best part of the new production was that “we can all be ourselves while we’re doing it.”Mr. Cilento said he purposefully sought a more diverse cast for the revival.“I did a very eclectic, really exciting group of dancers because I felt like you had to embrace the whole culture and not just make it, you know, white bread,” he said.Mx. Krouse, who leads the number “Spring Chicken” in the show, said: “It’s weird doing a show where I can be me, and it’s OK.”M&M’s celebrating the show’s opening night featured dancers’ names.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesQuick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      “The White Lotus” Dance Remix is the Hottest Club Song

      by

      Variations of the spine-tingling intro music have played at rave parties, Australian music festivals and Sundance.On a recent club night in Chicago, a high-pitched woman’s voice that sounded like a gobbling turkey — dropping acid — brought everyone to the dance floor. Some people swayed, twisting their hips and twirling their hair in a hypnotic lock step. Others pumped their fists and jumped up and down. One woman let out a high-pitched scream, as though she’d just spotted Chris Hemsworth at the grocery store.The tune was the EDM dance remix of “Renaissance (Main Title Theme),” the wordless title music that plays over the opening credits of Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” the hit HBO Max series about a group of wealthy people who vacation at the luxury resort — and the people who serve them.Since the second season, set in Sicily, began in late October, remixes of the oscillating harp notes, written by the Chilean Canadian composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, have spread across TikTok, SoundCloud and in the EDM community. Remixes are now playing in clubs and at music festivals. Last weekend, at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah, Diplo unveiled his own mix at 1:30 a.m. “Renaissance” is a variation on the series’s Season 1 theme, “Aloha! — Main Title Theme,” also by Mr. Tapia de Veer,  which features drums and bird songs (that season was set in Maui) and won an Emmy for best original main title theme music. “Aloha” had the same choppy melody, though it did not take off on TikTok or spawn a club following like “Renaissance.”What’s different about Mr. Tapia de Veer’s new beat? Here’s how the song became a crowd-pleasing anthem.Wait, doesn’t everyone nowadays just skip past a show’s theme song?Aah, the “skip intro” button debate. When it’s the intro song to “The Big Bang Theory?” Yes. When the composer has won an Emmy? Your loss.When did the song take off on TikTok?After the first episode of the new season dropped Oct. 30, someone realized: The high-pitched yodeling was danceable. And unlike the Season 1 variation, “Renaissance” climaxes to a throbbing EDM beat near the one-minute mark (the entire song runs 1 minute and 38 seconds long).Over the next few months, thousands of videos flooded the platform, with users setting the ethereal earworm to their own kooky dance moves, frying eggs and lawn manicuring.Why can’t I get it out of my head?Edward Venn, a professor of music at Leeds University in England, broke it down for British GQ in the fall: “It’s the way that the initial minor chord moves to the major — offering a sense of hope, of respite — only for it to slide back, continually and unstoppably, to the threatening implications of that minor chord,” he said.So how did it get into clubs?For weeks, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram users have been sharing videos of partygoers dancing ecstatically as the twisted operatic notes soar through basement bars and packed clubs.The rapper and “Euphoria” star Dominic Fike closed a set at the Terminal 5 music venue in Manhattan with the eerie melody in December, the latest instance of a tune from TV becoming a party staple (we see you, Wednesday Addams and your jerky, infectious “Goo Goo Muck” dance).Where else has it shown up?It turns out that the operatic discothèque sound bath — punctuated by human screeches — works just as well on a large scale as a small one. The Killers opened several stadium shows in December with the song.Days before the show’s finale, a music festival in Australia played the song, to which many in the crowd of thousands of bucket-hatted and fanny-packed revelers tried to vocalize — erm, sing? — along.A heart-pounding remix of the ululating anthem even made an appearance at the end of a “Saturday Night Live” skit last weekend, played by another pop culture phenom: the killer robot doll M3gan, the newly minted camp horror icon with some dance moves of her own.What are some of the best remixes?One popular mash-up features Jennifer Coolidge and her meme-ready rant: “Please, these gays. They’re trying to murder me.”  Another, unveiled by the Dutch DJ Tiësto at a Miami Beach club on New Year’s Eve, makes you want to bang your head until you can’t feel your face. And there is a luscious tech house beat by Westend that will have your stereo shaking.“It captured the feral nature that’s inside all of us and that especially comes out on the dance floor,” said Tyler Morris, a New York-based DJ and music producer who spins under the name Westend. “Every time I play it in my DJ sets, it’s a showstopper.”How do you dance to it?Fist pumps, waving arms and synchronized — or not — flailing limbs, seem to be popular. The robot — or even a fast-moving zombie imitation à la “The Last of Us” — might work well here.Any word on the theme music for Season 3?While the show has been renewed for a third season, there’s no word yet on the next resort destination. The only thing that might be more popular than the EDM “Renaissance”? A K-pop version. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      TikToker Lands the Role of a Lifetime: Playing Dead on TV

      by

      Every day for nearly a year, Josh Nalley posted TikToks of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast in a television series or movie. Then “CSI: Vegas” reached out.The Otter Creek Outdoor Recreation Area, near Louisville, Ky., is Josh Nalley’s favorite place to play dead.This time of year is especially “creepy,” he said. The shuttered campground’s derelict buildings and the fallen leaves scattered on the ground make for an ideal filming location.Over the past year, Mr. Nalley has posted a daily TikTok of himself playing dead in the hopes of being cast as a corpse in a television series or movie. He’s lain prone along the banks of rivers and streams near his home in Kentucky; had his three dogs lick his face as he propped himself up against a tree; slumped in a car; floated in pools; draped himself over doorways and splattered himself across sidewalks.Mr. Nalley always included a caption tallying the number of days “of playing un-alive until I’m cast in a move or TV show as an un-alive body.”By mid-July, and about 200 videos later, “CSI: Vegas” took note. On Nov. 3, Mr. Nalley, 42, will appear on an episode of the forensic crime drama on CBS. The Courier-Journal of Louisville reported Mr. Nalley’s big, dead-guy break.“I was just having fun on the internet,” Mr. Nalley said. He never expected his campaign to actually catch on. He said he developed the concept “out of boredom.”

      @living_dead_josh #CloseYourRings #foryoupage #fyp ♬ Ruff Ryders’ Anthem (Re-Recorded / Remastered) – DMX “I was spending a lot of time on TikTok and trying to figure out what I could do to get on TikTok and maybe get in a movie with as little effort as I thought would be possible,” he said.Jason Tracey, the showrunner for “CSI: Vegas,” said Mr. Nalley was the perfect person to play “body in the background of the morgue.”“Nobody has done a more thorough job of auditioning for a nonspeaking role, maybe in the history of television,” Mr. Tracey said. “After 321 pictures or so, he hit his stride and it was time to get called up to the big leagues.”Mr. Nalley is not a big crime genre fan. In fact, he doesn’t watch much television at all. But he was a fan of the original “CSI.”He lives in Elizabethtown, Ky., and works as a restaurant manager in the next town over. He usually films multiple videos on his days off at nearby parks, like Bernheim Forest and Saunders Springs, or in his backyard, and posts them throughout the week. Sometimes he’ll even record outside the restaurant where he works.“A desolate, empty parking lot is always a good place to dump a big body,” he said.More often than not he films the videos using his phone and a tripod, but every once in a while he engages the help of friends of family. Mr. Nalley’s method is simple: He takes a couple of big breaths and then holds his breath for about 25 seconds and tries to stay as still as possible. That can prove difficult when a rock is digging into his side on the ground.“You want to move but you’re like, ‘No, just hold it for a little big longer,’” he said he tells himself.If he’s playing dead sitting up, Mr. Nalley will usually have his eyes open so viewers can see his face. If he’s lying down, his eyes are typically closed because “half my face is usually pressed into the ground.”While Mr. Nalley’s intentions are comedic in nature, TikTok does not always agree. He uses the term “un-alive” instead of “dead” and has moved away from gory makeup like fake blood and bullet wounds to avoid running afoul of the platform’s content moderators. (He’s been placed on probation with TikTok several times, he said.) Even Mr. Nalley’s handle, living_dead_josh, was crafted with TikTok’s algorithms in mind.He tries to capture TikTok trends of the moment and adds music to lighten the mood, including Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” and the “Peanuts” theme song for a Thanksgiving post. One of his favorite videos is from Christmas, when he usually gets together with friends for pizza and beer. Last year, they all played dead together.

      @living_dead_josh #fyp #foryoupage ♬ It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas – Michael Bublé “I love that one because they’re family to me, they were all in it.” Mr. Nalley said.More than 200 videos later, producers at CBS emailed him about a role on “CSI: Vegas.” He didn’t believe it at first, but after an exchange of several emails, the studio flew him to Los Angeles over the summer. Mr. Nalley announced his new gig on Sept. 15, in video No. 321, in a caption over footage of him splayed out on the Hollywood Walk of Fame next to the star of Marg Helgenberger, a longtime “CSI” actress.

      @living_dead_josh Tune in to the Season 2 premiere September 29th @csicbs #csivegas #cbs #dreamcometrue #goals #fyp #foryoupage ♬ Who Are You – The Who The job required him to sit through two hours of makeup to make it appear as if an autopsy had been completed on his character. Over the course of five hours of filming, Mr. Nalley’s instructions were simple and familiar: “Take a deep breath and look dead,” he recalled.Mr. Tracey, the “CSI” showrunner, said the show and the job of a crime scene investigator “can be unrelentingly grim,” and producers try to find “gallows humor in the profession and in the history of the franchise.”Mr. Nalley’s quiet presence “was a nice way to keep it light on set that day.”“We often have dummies down in the morgue,” Mr. Tracey said. “The cast was as surprised as anyone else to have a breathing corpse next to them.”But he did have some half-serious notes for the aspiring dead body.“Honestly I would have liked to see a little less breathing, but we can fix that in post,” Mr. Tracey said. He offered an insider tip: “Most people don’t know you’re not supposed to move your eyes at all. The trick is to find a spot and focus even though they’re closed.”Mr. Nalley said he wasn’t sure what would be next for his career — perhaps another television show or a movie, maybe even one with the filmmaker and actor Kevin Smith, he mused. “I always like his movies and I think we have the same sense of humor,” Mr. Nalley said. “That would be awesome, even just a cameo.”But for now, he’ll keep posting his daily TikToks for his about 120,000 followers.“I hope they laugh, honestly,” he said. “I hope they chuckle, and I hope that inspires somebody to be perseverant.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      The Young Women Who Make TikTok Weep

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherWhen the Scottish singer-songwriter Katie Gregson-MacLeod recorded a verse of an unfinished song called “Complex” and posted it to TikTok in August, she was tapping into the app’s penchant for confessional storytelling, and demonstrating its ease of distribution and repurposing.Overnight, the snippet propelled her into viral success, leading to a recording contract and placing her in a lineage of young women who have found success on the app via emotional catharsis — sad, mad or both. That includes Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” first gained traction there, and also Lauren Spencer-Smith, Sadie Jean, Gracie Abrams, Lizzy McAlpine, Gayle and many more.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about the evolution of TikTok’s musical ambitions and the expansion of its emotional range, how the music business has tried to capitalize on the app’s intimacy, and the speed with which a bedroom-recording confessional can become a universal story line.Guest:Rachel Brodsky, who writes about pop music for StereogumConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Katie Gregson-MacLeod Sang About a ‘Complex’ Love. TikTok Responded.

      by

      The 21-year-old Scottish folk singer-songwriter found a sudden hit by tapping into the platform’s appetite for melancholy with a striking, sorrowful chorus.If TikTok has made you cry sometime this month, it’s likely thanks to Katie Gregson-MacLeod.On Aug. 4, the 21-year-old Scottish singer-songwriter posted a minute-long chorus to an unreleased song she’d written called “Complex” — an elegiac capturing of the hollow, zombielike experience of loving someone far more than they can, or will, love you back. Her voice is lovely and affecting, somewhere between wistful and determined as she sings about a relationship that’s ongoing, but already over:I’m wearing his boxersI’m being a good wifeWe won’t be togetherBut maybe the next lifeGregson-MacLeod had just written the song, and had no plans to release it. But by the following morning, TikTok had supersized it, finding the eyes and ears of several young female singer-songwriters who have been successful on the app, including Gracie Abrams, Lennon Stella and Maisie Peters.Suddenly, Gregson-MacLeod was a meme, embodying the app’s potential as an amplifier of melancholy. In just a couple of days, “Complex” became a trigger for what felt like a global group hug.“When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” Gregson-MacLeod said of the full version of the song released to streaming services.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesTikTok is well-suited to this particular stripe of intimacy, because “people seem to love hearing going as in-depth of someone’s life as they can,” Gregson-MacLeod said last week in a video chat from her family’s home in Inverness, in the Scottish Highlands. “It’s a very online thing, but it’s also the same essence of what people love about people like Elliott Smith and Joni Mitchell. There are so many serious songwriters on there, but the ones that I’ve noticed doing really well are super raw, emotional and very stripped back.”Vulnerability is contagious, and TikTok, which allows users to both imbibe and amplify at the same time, is an optimal accelerant. The success of “Complex” reflects the evolving priorities of TikTok, which in its first couple of years was best known as an accelerant for dance trends, novelty songs and meme-able comedy, but is now just as often a home for sorrow. The shift reflects a partial maturation of the medium somewhere beyond pure escape.With her song gaining so much traction so quickly — the original post currently has 6.9 million views — Gregson-MacLeod did what any savvy young musician would do: She TikToked through it, posting duets with singers covering her, answering fan questions, making new memes, taking note of the interest from people she looked up to (“fletcher and olivia o’brien now know I have an anxious attachment style I was tryna play hard to get”). On Friday, Gregson-MacLeod formally released the full song — now titled “Complex (Demo)” — to streaming platforms, a few days after she signed a deal with the British arm of Columbia Records.The full song is, apart from one small tweak, identical to what she’d already written before her TikTok eruption. “When the chorus did so well, I swore to myself, I am not changing one word of the rest of the song,” she said. “It worked because it was just a moment, and it was a moment that was very real and raw. And then I was kind of like, if I changed too much or anything, then I’m going to be writing reactively and I’m going to be trying to think of what other people are going to want. And actually, it worked because it’s just what happened to me.”She didn’t elaborate on the specific scenario that prompted the song, but said, “For the most part, I write completely autobiographically, pretty much 100 percent.” She continued, “With this song, it was very much just like a very emotional moment, as you can probably tell. Literally just a moment where it all kind of poured out.”Until now, Gregson-MacLeod has been splitting her time between home and college, where she is studying history at the University of Edinburgh. She’s been releasing music on her own for a couple of years, including a frisky indie-pop EP last year, “Games I Play,” and a recent song, “Second Single Bed,” that’s almost as emotionally laserlike as “Complex.” In the last year, she’s found a welcoming home in the Edinburgh folk music scene that congregates around Captains Bar. She is a student of classic folk singers like Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and also younger ones like Laura Marling, Lucy Dacus and, naturally, Phoebe Bridgers: “She’s a bit of a god.”Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic. She has a natural way with humor in her posts — part sincere, part can-you-believe-we’re-all-doing-this. Before “Complex” took off, she was a barista at Perk Coffee & Doughnuts (“Inverness’s first doughnut shop,” she noted), and handled the shop’s social media posts. Perk was also where all the A&R representatives who traveled to Inverness to meet her this month ended up hanging out at different tables.“Complex” has allowed Gregson-MacLeod to take her place in an impressive lineage of female singer-songwriters who have used TikTok as an engine over the last two years: Lauren Spencer-Smith (“Fingers Crossed”), Sadie Jean (“WYD Now?”), Lizzy McAlpine (“You Ruined the 1975”), Jensen McRae, poppier singers like Gayle and Tate McRae. (The McRaes are not related.) And of course, the alpha of this phenomenon: Olivia Rodrigo, whose “Drivers License” began life as an acoustic snippet on TikTok before becoming the defining pop song of 2021.Gregson-MacLeod began posting to TikTok in 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and had been studying at college and working in a coffee shop when her song took off.Jaime Molina for The New York TimesOne of the particular quirks of putting vulnerable sentiment into a song is that, if it becomes popular, it no longer truly belongs to you. To have that happen so quickly with “Complex” has been lightly head spinning for Gregson-MacLeod, who is still getting acclimated to the way her song is being absorbed out in the wild.Mostly, she finds it humorous. When someone covers it with a slightly different sentiment in their caption, “I always comment ‘me for real,’” she said. Some people are using her melody and adding different lyrics. “The trend is now to rewrite it, which is, like, mildly insulting,” she said, laughing. “It’s like mainly lovely but you’re like, ‘Hey guys, can the trend be to appreciate what I wrote?’” She participated in a TikTok duet chain with Gayle and Catie Turner, shouting absurdist ad-libs over her tender tune.There have also been a few versions written from a male point of view. “Whenever I hear ‘She’s wearing my boxers,’ I’m like, ‘No,’” she joked. “Read the room, man.”Gregson-MacLeod put “(Demo)” in the title of the finished song because she wanted to be clear that this is just a way station. “I knew that this version had to be first, it had to be the raw emotional moment that it was in the video,” she said. “But it also leaves room for whatever I want to do in a few weeks, a few months or whatever, because I think it’s going to have a long life.” The sentiment belongs to everybody, but the song remains hers. More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel.

      by

      Why Do We Love TikTok Audio Memes? Call It Brainfeel. On March 25, 2020, Chris Gleason was in bed at his parents’ house in Pennsylvania, thinking up ideas for videos that might go viral. Just before graduating from college with a musical-theater degree in 2019, he took a job at a nautical-themed restaurant in the […] More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Beach Bunny Is Building an Indie-Rock Career in a Time of TikTok

      by

      The singer-songwriter Lili Trifilio has had two songs connect — and get slightly misconstrued — on the app. With more ears on her band’s second album, what message will she deliver?One morning last August, Lili Trifilio was feeling emotional.“I’m honestly so nervous,” the singer-songwriter, then 24, admitted, her voice rising as she shook her head. It was the day before her indie-rock band Beach Bunny would headline a sold-out show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Beach Bunny’s recent success had seemed abstract to Trifilio, since most of it had happened during lockdown, on the internet, but the group’s biggest New York show to date would make it tangible.“Over the pandemic, Beach Bunny has grown like 200 percent,” Trifilio continued, between sips of an iced Nutella mocha latte at a cafe not far from the venue, “and I don’t know what to expect.”Trifilio has a wide, toothy smile and a choppy bobbed haircut that she likes to dye different colors — magenta, lilac, rust — though that day it was a naturalistic blonde. Onstage, she’s known for her bubbly, earnest positivity; at a recent Beach Bunny show, she gave an enthused recommendation for a local vegan restaurant, urged the audience to get their Covid-19 booster shots and led the entire crowd in singing “Happy Birthday” to a fan. On albums she’s known for the emotional lucidity of her songwriting, which seems to trap fleeting feelings in shimmery amber.Much of the recent growth in Beach Bunny’s popularity came via “Cloud 9,” a bouncy, guitar-driven love song from the Chicago band’s February 2020 debut album, “Honeymoon,” which in March 2021 became a viral hit on TikTok. Over 360,000 videos have now used Trifilio’s lilting valentine (“But when he loves me, I feel like I’m floating/When he calls me pretty, I feel like somebody”) to soundtrack photo reels of their lovers, crushes and besties; it has racked up more than 240 million streams on Spotify.Several fans have asked Trifilio to record an acoustic version of “Cloud 9,” so they can use it as their wedding song. Trifilio finds it all a little ironic, given that she wrote it in the final days of a failing relationship.“The lyrics are so smart,” Tegan Quin of the indie-pop duo Tegan and Sara said in a phone interview, “and melodically I find all their songs to be really creative.” She and her twin sister Sara were fans before “Cloud 9” took off, but the song’s popularity provided an opportunity for them to collaborate with Beach Bunny on a new version — as requested by fans — that also features “she” and “they” pronouns.Beach Bunny’s music has plenty of admirers outside of the TikTok demographic, too. The actor Bob Odenkirk discovered the band several years ago while flipping through The Chicago Tribune, and he “immediately dug them,” he wrote in an email, because he found their sound to be “connected to the indie rock that I loved from the days of yore,” like Pixies, Sebadoh and the Cavedogs. He’s since become a vocal fan and even made a cameo in Beach Bunny’s recent “Star Wars”-spoofing video for the song “Entropy.”“I’m an older white guy, and her lyrics are about longing and written from a female perspective,” Odenkirk added. “But I still feel very connected to the pain and estrangement of my 14-year-old self, and I always will.”While the breakout of “Cloud 9” (and a prior TikTok success, “Prom Queen”) brought the band opportunities, Trifilio feared being pigeonholed or not taken seriously. “I was such a crab about it,” she said, twisting her straw. “Like I’m going to fall into this genre of internet bands. I was like, ‘No, I want to play big stages and play with bands I like, and not be thought of as cringey. I had all these weird ego dilemmas.”Perhaps to combat those fears, during the pandemic, Trifilio taught herself about music production. She watched YouTube tutorials and countless interviews with producers who inspired her, like the electro-pop star Grimes. When the band started recording its second album, “Emotional Creature,” at Chicago’s Shirk Studios last spring, she felt more empowered to experiment.“I think it’s cool that she’s an all-in-one show and does everything hands on,” Trifilio said of Grimes, citing her aggressively upbeat 2015 single “Kill V. Maim” as one of her favorite songs. “So after listening to her talk about production, going in I was like, ‘OK, I don’t really know how to do this, but can we make the beginning have this vibe? Before, I never knew to bring in those references.”That increased ambition is apparent across “Emotional Creature,” out July 22, from the bright, explosively catchy leadoff track “Entropy” to the thrilling, nearly six-minute finale, “Love Song,” which in its satisfying final moments weaves together a medley of several other songs from the album.“It still sounds like Beach Bunny,” Trifilio said, “but it just sounds a little more grown up. Which I’m happy with, because I’m growing up.”Trifilio onstage at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in August 2021. Before the show, the singer-songwriter admitted, “I’m honestly so nervous.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesTRIFILIO WAS RAISED in Chicago, and she started taking guitar lessons with a friend in fifth grade. “We did not have the attention spans for it,” she said with a laugh in a recent video interview from her childhood bedroom, where the purple walls matched her tie-dye butterfly shirt. (She moved into her own place during the pandemic, but still visits her parents frequently.) “But it was fun. That’s where I learned my basic skills. We were just like obnoxious kids, and so after a couple of years I quit because I had other things to do as a 13-year-old.”Later in her teen years, Trifilio started participating in neighborhood jam sessions and teaching herself cover songs. She has noted on Twitter, amid the occasional Hannah Montana quotation, that while journalists compare her sound to “cool” ’90s bands, her most direct influence is the pop group Aly & AJ’s 2007 album, “Insomniatic.” (I hear traces of the alt-rock mainstays Letters to Cleo and the cheery indie-pop group Velocity Girl.) When she was 18, she thought, “Well, I’ve learned a lot of covers. Let’s see if I can use this combined knowledge to write something.”The result was “6 Weeks,” a wailing, melancholic recollection of heartbreak (“Let’s begin at the end, when you tore me apart”) that she recorded on her computer with just an acoustic guitar. She presented it to her guitar-lesson friend as casually as possible: “I was like, I made this song, and I’m so embarrassed. Can you listen? I think I’m going to delete it.”Trifilio’s pal gave her a much needed confidence boost — and an ultimatum. “She was like, ‘I’m going to stop being your friend if you don’t put this out,’” Trifilio recalled. “I was like, whoa, OK. Stakes are high.”For the next few years, while she was studying journalism at DePaul University, Trifilio continued writing sharp, hooky power-pop songs and uploading them to a modest but growing online fan base. In 2017, she also started playing shows with a local group of guys — the drummer Jon Alvarado, the guitarist Matt Henkels and the bassist Aidan Cada, who was later replaced by Anthony Vaccaro — and her solo project became a proper band.Trifilio’s candid, plain-spoken lyrics often sound like internal monologues; sometimes they’re pep talks, other times they give voice to her demons. The title track from the 2018 EP “Prom Queen” straddles the line between the two. “Shut up, count your calories,” it begins over a jangly chord progression. “I never looked good in Mom jeans.” The song became one of the most downcast tracks to inspire an internet dance craze. As her anxiety builds, the song becomes a critique of aesthetic perfectionism and diet culture that Trifilio, who has admitted that she has “struggled with [her] own body image,” knows all too well.Many listeners related to Trifilio’s unabashed presentation of her insecurities. But “Prom Queen” found success on a platform that often rewards young people for adhering to the very conventions Trifilio was critiquing. Some noted the irony when the popular TikTok creator Addison Rae — the app’s honorary prom queen — posted a video of herself dancing and grinningly lip-syncing to a song that goes, “I was never cut out for Prom Queen.”TikTok can make a song incredibly popular overnight; it can also very often divorce a song, or even fragments of a song, from its larger context. Trifilio, who was not yet familiar with the app when “Prom Queen” blew up in 2019, was concerned that listeners who only heard a line or two of the song might misconstrue it as an endorsement of behavior like calorie counting. So she pinned a lengthy statement to the song’s YouTube video, clearly stating her authorial intentions.“I wrote this song for every person out there that has felt insecure, unloved, or unhappy in their own skin,” she wrote. “Please don’t harm your health or well being to live up to these invented expectations, it is not worth risking your life over.”Three years and another round of app-fueled success later, Trifilio said she’s learned to relinquish control of how her songs might be received. “You know, I use music in the same way,” she said. “I’m sure artists had different intentions than how I interpret things.” “Prom Queen,” she added, is “kind of the public’s song now.”AT A JULY 2019 show in New Mexico, Trifilio was surprised to notice a familiar face at the merch table: Odenkirk. He mentioned an upcoming audition he was preparing for, and as they parted Trifilio wished him good luck. “He spun around, gave me the finger guns, and he was like, ‘I don’t need it,’” she recalled with a laugh. “And I was like, ‘That’s right, you don’t need it!’ I need that level of confidence!’”The bold and self-assured sound of “Emotional Creature” shows how far she’s come. Sean O’Keefe, who produced the album, called her “one of the best songwriters I’ve ever gotten to work with, and I’ve been fortunate enough to work with a lot of really great songwriters.” (His credits include Fall Out Boy and Plain White T’s.)“There is definitely a young girl audience, mostly coming from TikTok, with very little experience of even attending shows,” Trifilio said of the band’s evolving crowd.Lyndon French for The New York TimesOn the new album, piercing pop-punk tunes like “Gone” and “Deadweight” challenge emotionally ambivalent partners to wear their hearts on their sleeves. “You’re a diamond/Wish you could see you the way I see,” Trifilio sings on the mid-tempo rocker “Weeds,” during a chorus that offers loving advice to a heartbroken friend — or perhaps the singer herself. Writing the album, she said, helped her to confront her history of “shame around feeling big emotions.”“That was, like, a therapy moment,” she said. “‘Wow, you have a lot of shame around being an emotional person, even though every human has feelings.”’Trifilio has since come around on TikTok, too. “There is definitely a young girl audience, mostly coming from TikTok, with very little experience of even attending shows,” she said. “They tell me, ‘This is one of my first shows,’ and I’m like, ‘That’s amazing. I hope you go to so many more.’”Such experiences seem indicative, to artists of a previous generation like Tegan and Sara, of a palpable change. “Streaming has devastated the music industry for artists, but it’s also made it really easy to be popular in corners of the industry that just didn’t exist when we were coming up,” Quin said. “Beach Bunny is an example of that. There’s just this vibrant, incredible scene flourishing around them because people can find them.”At the Brooklyn cafe, Trifilio had noted, “When I was 16, there would be some band I’d see and I’d think, ‘It would be so cool to be in a band.’” Preparing to greet some of her new fans in the flesh the following night, she added, “It’s amazing to think that someone might come to a show and maybe that inspires them to learn a Beach Bunny song on guitar. And then they learn other songs on guitar. That’s wild.” More