LANA’s rise to rap stardom started as so many musical success stories do: with a breakup. “I got dumped by my boyfriend and I wanted to [get] some revenge,” the Japanese artist tells NME through a translator during her first ever visit to London. “I wanted to make sure that he saw me everywhere.”
The 21-year-old can be pretty confident that her ex is among the 1.1million Spotify listeners that tune in to her genre-hopping pop rap anthems every month. With her sugary blend of girlish charm and fiery bilingual delivery, LANA has a way of channeling vulnerability into empowerment mantras, fusing strutting pop verses with sunny dance grooves and growling bars with breaking Jersey beats.
When she arrives at a secluded east London studio with her entourage in tow for a photoshoot to accompany her ‘Bose x NME C25’ mixtape track ‘Icy Tale’, she’s dressed down in a black zip-up hoody and grey jogging bottoms with long, bejewelled nails and spiky false lashes. But signs of her Barbiefied alter ego hang nearby on a clothing rail that displays an array of bubblegum pink and bright yellow garment options.
As we climb into a snug attic space overlooking a chimney-filled skyline, she pops off her shoes and sits crossed-legged in a swinging garden chair surrounded by draping house plants. Opening up about ‘Icy Tale’, her “cute love song” which features on this year’s ‘C25’ mixtape, she explains: “In Japanese, ‘I love you’ is ‘aishiteru’, but it sounds quite similar, so I’m playing around [with that].” Like many of LANA’s songs, it seamlessly interweaves English and Japanese lyrics without missing a beat, nosediving into a husky rap sequence before she springs back up into a cutesy chorus.
Balancing the sweet with the fierce – or the ‘kawaii’ (which means “cute” in Japanese) with ‘gyaru’ (a Japanese subculture characterised by “strong-minded” women) rebelliousness – is something LANA knows all about. She released her debut album ‘20’ last year, which was a chance to fully embody the larger-than-life street persona she’s crowned “Princess LANA”. “There’s the ‘Queen Of Rap’, ‘Queen Of Hip-Hop’, ‘Queen Of R&B’, but I want to be the ‘Princess’,” she shares with twinkly-eyed optimism. “Princess LANA artistic-wise is more positive, but obviously as a normal person, I still have this dark side. Both personas encourage each other to make sure it balances out.”
LANA listened to an array of music genres growing up in Kanagawa, a coastal prefecture just south of Tokyo, including hip-hop, rap and Japanese traditional music. She started making her own songs when she was 16 years old, finding an outlet in penning lyrics about love, relationships and staying positive during the tricky teenage years. She felt especially drawn to rap because of the potential for creative wordplay which she had a knack for, even in two languages. “Sometimes it fits more with Japanese, sometimes it fits more with English,” she explains of her writing process.
In 2020, she began to upload songs to SoundCloud, starting out with the demo for ‘Hate Me’, which ended up on her debut album. She soon began featuring on a raft of tracks with other Japanese artists, including her brother and fellow rapper LEX, before she officially started dropping her own solo music. “Within five years, because I’ve got more listeners and more followers, my quality of life has got better,” she explains of the whirlwind journey. “But at the same time, my songs are encouraging young people in a positive way which also makes me happy.”
LANA’s rise is coming at a time where not only are fellow female rappers like Doechii, GloRilla and Coi Leray (who LANA cites as a huge influence) dominating, but non-English music – particularly K-pop from South Korea – is becoming more mainstream than ever. It’s especially heartening for LANA, whose first ever CD was a release by the K-pop band Kara. “Asian people practise a lot,” she says. “They don’t show you how much they do. But it’s good that now people are seeing them, listening to them, following them, it’s amazing.”
When we ask how it feels to be featured on the iconic NME mixtape, she humbly says that she’s excited at the prospect of her song being heard by a global audience. Back home, though, she’s already gearing up to perform in arenas later this year. “I don’t want to overthink [it],” she says of the upcoming tour. Instead, she’s keeping sight of her bigger goal, which is to “encourage more teenagers to survive and be happy”. As for where she sees herself in another five years from now, there’s no hesitation when it comes to that manifestation, as she shares with a knowing smile: “I want to be the princess of Gen Z.”
Stay tuned to NME.com/C25 for the latest on the return of the iconic mixtape