We’ve written about Seattle-based Cambodian-American artist Thavoron several times in recent months, following her mission to explore ideas of grief, desire and cultural identity from within the queer immigrant experience across a number of singles on Trailing Twelve Records. Each track offered a personal, soul-searching picture of artist coming to terms with their truest self, so it feels fitting the latest Thavoron full-length is a self-titled album. As though, collected together on a record, the release forms the clearest picture of them as a person and their place on this earth.
The resonance of this is deepened by the fact Thavoron officially came out as trans this summer, a landmark occasion which in many ways feels like the destination at the end of the journey the album represents. If songs like ‘My Man‘ were notable for their unguarded emotion, and ‘Forever Young‘ for the instinctive picture of longing and romance, then to announce the embrace of a truer identity in time with the release of the album feels like a continuation of the project. An example of art and life aligning in search of honesty and freedom.
Latest single ‘American Urge’ embodies this spirit as clearly as anywhere else on the album. A song inspired by an argument Thavoron had with her father, where the accumulated baggage of preconception and expectation precipitated into something real. “My father is someone who’s very hot-headed, yet strong willed, but also very unforgiving. My concept of self has always been altered and molded by him. I’ve grown akin to feeling like I’ll never be good enough to reach my father’s standards, in order for him to be proud of me,” Thavoron explains. “I really wanted to touch on the realization that this is all a facade, in order to keep you from recognizing the power you hold from being yourself. Nothing you ever do will be good enough for the wrong people, so you might as well live your life the way you want to and be unapologetic about it. It’s your life, and nobody else’s.”
Thavoron is out now via Trailing Twelve Records.
Photo by Maddie Ludgate