Some people find their taste. Yel was born with hers.

While her friends were playing contemporary hip hop, she was somewhere in the eighties and nineties, deep in R&B and jazz and neo soul, music that felt like it came from a different planet than the one she was growing up in. Nobody put her there. She just landed there, young, and never left. "None of my friends listened to that kind of stuff," she tells me. "Every time I would show them something I was like, this is dope, they'd be like, really? This is the kind of music my dad would play."

Yel was born in Korea, went to international school, and eventually made her way to California for college. She flies back and forth every three or four months now, long hauls, time zones, the whole thing. But she doesn't romanticize the grind of it. "I think I'm just feeling really grateful to even have the opportunity to fly back and forth," she says. "I know so many people that do music back in Korea and want to move here and do music here." Gratitude over performance. That's a recurring thing with her.

What California gave her wasn't a new identity. It gave her space. She's a self-described laid back, low maintenance person. New York was never the move. "I felt like busy cities like that wouldn't be for me." She got her driver's license back home and then didn't drive for five years because she didn't need to. Here she does. That's about as dramatic as the culture shock gets for her. She figured out her sound long before she figured out the freeway system.

That sound, the eighties and nineties thing, it shows up everywhere in how she creates. When she's building a mood board, she goes straight to nineties nostalgia, retro references, old music videos. When she's with her friends, she brings a digital camera and makes vlogs. "I would genuinely make me so happy," she says. "Even to this day, sometimes I look over old vlogs and I post them on my YouTube channel just for memories. I always text my friend that's in the vlog saying I miss you. I miss this day because it feels so nostalgic."

There's a tenderness in the way she talks about preservation. About holding onto things. It carries into the music too.

Her earlier work has been described by her own fans as bright and happy. She doesn't disagree, exactly. But she wants more room than that. "My fans started seeing me as just a happy lover girl, which is true, but there are different sides of me. I didn't want to be boxed into a label." So the new music is going darker. Not as a rebrand, more like an unlocking. She's been listening to darker music her whole life. It just hadn't made it into her releases yet.

Part of what made that unlocking possible is where she landed. Yel signed to Soka Records, an independent label founded by James Dai, who spent years building keshi from a 150-person room in Houston to selling out Madison Square Garden. Dai started Soka with a specific idea: less focus on distribution machines, more focus on artist identity. He calls it an artist studio model, taking cues from how Motown actually developed people, not just released them. For Yel, that philosophy landed at exactly the right moment.

This new project was also made differently. For the first time, she got in the studio with producers she'd been dreaming of working with. Not type beats at home alone, not the DIY process she'd built her early catalog on.

"I was literally asking ChatGPT today, how do I practice not being shy," she says, and she's laughing, but she means it. "Before, it didn't really matter because I'd just be home alone working by myself. But now I'm in the studio with people I don't know, or just met for the first time, for hours. It's really important for me to be confident and speak up and not be afraid to throw out ideas."

It's an interesting tension for someone whose whole creative output is deeply public. Putting music on the internet for thousands of people is one thing. Saying an unfinished thought out loud to a producer you respect is something else entirely. "The process is the stressful part for me because I need to really like it, and it's hard to get to that point because I'm also very picky. But once it's done, then I'm like, I'm a freak."

She's not chasing a destination with this project. She's clear about that. "After this upcoming project, there are still more sides to me. It's just one of the steps I'm taking to reach the point where my full potential is expressed."

That's not humility as a PR move. That's someone who genuinely knows she's in the middle of something and isn't pretending otherwise. She's not arriving. She's unfolding.