Andr, the Taiwanese Singer Who Refuses to Choose a Single Sound
From the bedroom where she recorded her first album to collaborations with artists from Thailand, Japan and South Korea, Andr creates music in which genres and identities remain deliberately fluid.
At first, Andr thought she would be unable to cry in front of a camera. When she was asked to do it, however, something changed: she entered the emotional state for real and afterwards felt lighter. Crying, she explained, felt freer than having to perform a smile.
That experience became “Cry in your TV”, one of the six tracks on SKIN.
The story contains many of the questions running through the new project by Taiwanese singer Andr: how authentic is the image we present? Where does personal expression end and performance begin? How much control do we have over the way others interpret what they see?
For Andr, building a recognisable identity does not mean making it stable. It means protecting its ability to change.
Andr, the Taiwanese singer who began in a bedroom
Andr, pronounced “an-der”, was born in Taiwan in 2000. She began writing music as a student, combining guitar with sounds sampled from her surroundings, before Fortune Coookie Records discovered her during a university competition.
Her official debut arrived in 2023 with “Night Lotion 融”, a song in which her soft voice moves over production suspended between R&B, indie pop and alternative music. Spotify later selected the track for Best of Radar 2023.
Describing Andr as a bedroom-pop artist is only partly accurate. The bedroom is not simply a lo-fi aesthetic, but the physical place where her writing, production and visual imagination first developed together.
That dimension became central to her debut album, shhh, it’s under my bed, released on 25 October 2024.
The monsters hidden under the bed
The title shhh, it’s under my bed connects two images belonging to different stages of growing up. As a child, the bed was a place beneath which a monster might hide. During adolescence, the same space became storage for letters, collections and personal objects.
Andr transformed this ambiguity into the architecture of a thirteen-track album. Beneath the bed are fears, memories, contradictions and versions of the self that cannot always coexist on the surface.
She wrote almost all of the lyrics and compositions while also contributing to arrangements and instrumentation.
Much of the material was recorded in her bedroom and producer Han Li-kang’s studio, with musicians connected to bands including Sunset Rollercoaster, No Party for Cao Dong and Robot Swing.
The project extends beyond music. Andr and illustrator BANFF created eleven monsters, each linked to a song and a different part of her inner world. Designer Yang Shih-ching placed them inside a collage-based visual identity, while the physical edition includes randomly distributed illustrated cards.
The monsters are not necessarily something to defeat. They are fragments of personality with which she shares the same space.
The album therefore introduces a question that SKIN would develop less than two years later: how can an identity be shown without reducing it to one image?
What lies beneath SKIN
Released on 22 July 2026, SKIN is a six-track EP built from different experiments.
Some songs began with a guitar; others emerged from a drum loop made with a toy or from a sonic intuition that did not initially belong to a unified project.
The connection appeared gradually. Skin became a metaphor for what we show other people: a visible surface that is not necessarily transparent. It can be altered, designed and misread.
Andr does not use the idea to search for one authentic identity hidden beneath every appearance. The point is more ambiguous. Even what we consider authentic can change, and every person contains different aspects that do not need to be returned to a single definition.
“preTty girl bOY” makes that mobility visible through its title. The capital letters form the word “TOY”, linking gender expression to something that can be played with and explored. The song does not resolve ambiguity; it treats it as a space of freedom.
“night night”, created with South Korean musician Whys Young, carries that openness into a more intimate and feminine perspective. Andr has nevertheless stressed that listeners are not required to accept this interpretation. Like skin, a song can be read in different ways.
Collaborating without becoming the same
Andr’s music has also grown through a network of collaborations across Asia. She recorded “Swapping Socks” with Thai artist mindfreakkk!, released “Cat & Mouse” with Japanese producer A.G.O and created “night night” with Whys Young. In 2026 she also shared the Summer Sonic stage with Japanese artist REJAY.
These collaborations do not appear designed to make her sound easier to export. Andr describes them instead as encounters in which artists must be allowed to preserve their differences.
Personal connection often comes before music. Her collaboration with Whys Young, for example, was not planned during their first meeting. Only after Andr began writing “night night” did she recognise Whys Young as the right voice for the song.
Her music works in the same way: apparently incompatible elements are placed in relation without being forced into homogeneity. Andr has compared her sound to a platypus, a creature made from characteristics that seem to belong to different animals but still form a complete organism.
Alternative, R&B, indie rock and pop therefore do not create a fixed formula. They remain audible precisely because they continue to exist in tension.
Four Andr songs to start with
“Night Lotion 融” is the starting point. It already contains the voice, intimacy and unstable balance between genres that would become central to her work.
“preTty girl bOY” represents the present. Its typographic game, fluid approach to gender expression and production show how Andr uses pop to keep multiple interpretations open.
“Cry in your TV” enters the emotional centre of SKIN. Beginning with the relationship between image and authenticity, it asks whether showing an emotion before a camera necessarily makes it less real.
“night night” reveals how Andr uses collaboration not to erase the differences between two artists, but to make them part of the same song.
Identity as possibility
Andr’s path already includes a Best New Artist nomination at the Golden Indie Music Awards for Hidden Card 藏招 and another in the same category at the Golden Melody Awards for shhh, it’s under my bed.
Yet the most interesting part of her development is not her progression through increasingly prestigious categories.
Andr appears determined not to let recognition become another form of immobility.
She does not seek one definitive genre, one version of herself or an identity that can be translated immediately for the international market.
From the bedroom to festival stages, from monsters hidden under the bed to skin exposed to other people’s gaze, her music continues to change its surface without losing its centre.
Perhaps that is precisely what makes her recognisable: Andr refuses to choose a single sound because she treats the ability to transform as an essential part of her voice.
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