Based in Seattle, Thavoron is a Cambodian American musician who creates queer pop whilst channeling the intimacy and inventiveness of the likes of Frank Ocean, Faye Webster and Bon Iver.
Growing up, Thavoron felt underrepresented within the music industry, and now hopes to create a sense of community and visibility for queer Southeast Asian Americans within music. Talking about the experience, Thavoron says, ‘Being surrounded by people I couldn’t fully relate to resorted to me locking myself up in my bedroom to just write to try and make sense of all my differences as a person’.
Thavoron’s latest release is Body, a song that seeks to celebrate queer freedom amidst emotionally resonant dance production. The result is haunting, Thavoron’s breathless vocals soaring above rousing, layered instrumentation. Live guitars and drums evoke a sense of humanity, Prince-like in the way they blend with the more electronic elements here, whilst shimmering synths give the song a sense of dramatic celestial majesty. Describing the song, Thavoron says:
'The importation for Body was a sort of reclamation of my sexuality… I was starting to shift my mindset and realised the power you can hold or remove in sex and intimacy.’