Tei Shi had just started her tour with Blood Orange when the world shut down. Two shows in, the buzz was high, the crowd was wild, and then — day off. “That’s when everything shifted,” she tells me. “We all kind of knew. Like, oh… this isn’t happening.” Cue the mass existential dread, canceled dates, and the usual “how do I get home from the middle of nowhere” anxiety spiral.
That tour — which would’ve brought her songs with Dev Hynes to the stage for the first time — became a casualty of early COVID chaos. But instead of retreating, Tei Shi wrote. Six days, one songwriting retreat in Texas, and a full EP later, she’d somehow made her most unfiltered work yet.
“Before this, I was signed — that whole traditional label/artist setup,” she says. “It always took a year to get anything out. By the time a song was released, I’d already moved on emotionally.” Now, newly independent, she’s embracing speed over perfection. “I didn’t want to overthink it. I just wanted to make something and put it out before I second-guessed everything.”
Her new single, “Die for Your Love,” kicks off the EP — a danceable, glossy banger that leads into more acoustic, raw territory. “It’s like a spectrum,” she explains. “Some are pop, some are stripped down, but they all came from one emotional space. I wrote them at the top of the year, and it was already a dark time for me — before everything even started.”
She ended up accidentally capturing the global mood. “It felt apocalyptic when I was writing it. And then… the world caught up.”
She’s quick to credit Dev Hynes — aka Blood Orange — as a major influence on her process. “He doesn’t impose. He listens, then disappears for two minutes, and comes back with something incredible,” she says. “Working with him taught me to relax. I can get intense about things, but he’s like this calming presence. That’s been rubbing off on me.”
The change isn’t just emotional — it’s creative. She’s shifting how she writes, even what language she writes in. “Writing in Spanish feels different. It’s more guttural,” she says. “In English, I’m thinking more. In Spanish, it just comes out. I’m trying to do more of that — write from a different place, tell stories, maybe not even my own.”
That freedom — to tell other people’s stories, to make music without waiting a year for label notes — is what drives the EP. “This time, I didn’t start writing in a room with a new producer. I wrote the songs first, over simple stuff, and then figured out the production later,” she says. “It’s like I’m directing now. And it’s easier. It’s way easier.”
There’s still weight to the songs — she’s not drifting into ambient fluff. But the tone has shifted. “I was going through this rebirth phase. Letting go of baggage,” she says. “These songs are me moving into something new. They talk to each other because I was feeling all of it at once.”
In other words: Tei Shi doesn’t need the industry to be wonderful. She just needs it out of her way.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
