TeZATalks: Black Pearl
Tasia Thomas, aka TeZATalks. (Photo by Abby Rouillard.)
On a chilly October afternoon, Tasia Thomas opens the door and steps into the light.
I have to ring her up first, after I arrive in front of a cluster of Fremont apartments and suddenly realize I don’t know which one she’s staying at. Turns out it’s the one closest to the street, next to a curbside cast in blinding white, under trees approaching full color.
The woman who warmly greets me is in rest mode, clad in comfortable leggings and a tight tank top that reveals a handful of tattoos, each aching with a secret significance. (One of them, the word “pearl” scrawled in spiky black lettering across her sternum, immediately meets my eye line.) Currently she’s caught in between a ceaseless schedule of choreography and band rehearsal for an upcoming show at Neumos. Despite the stress of the workload, she’s calm and cheery, clearly happy to talk to someone about the fruits of her labor.
I’ve wanted to talk to her too, for quite a while. I’ve known about TeZATalks - Thomas’ alter ego - for years simply through osmosis, having absorbed the words of stunned others about the quality of her work. She’s one of the few artists in our vicinity that understands the cold reality of having to be more than the music, which is why she’s built a robust social media presence, released a fleet of high-quality music videos, and is currently putting the work in with onstage choreography. In a place notorious for a culture of humility, TeZATalks is an oasis of unbridled ambition and responsible confidence in unapologetically being herself: that is to say, an anime-loving laced-up alt-girl covering Limp Bizkit and donning white grease paint for the outcasts in the back.
After we embrace, Thomas leads me upstairs into a furnished room with a small kitchen and an even smaller balcony. The sliding door is cracked open slightly to let a little fresh air in. Otherwise the heater’s making the place comfortable, almost cocoon-like, and it somewhat softens my typical pre-interview nerves.
We’re not the only people in the house. Rapper and producer Mackenzie Sinclair enters early on and kindly introduces himself before retreating to the third floor, vape in hand. Not long after, singer-songwriter Alexis Forchette floats into the room and lounges on the couch behind us. Forchette, unbeknownst to me, is a talented musician in her own right and one of Thomas’ closest friends, the pair having met during their college days. She’s totally comfortable with an interview happening in the room; at one point she graciously sets a fresh bowl of greens and red grapes between us, and we mindlessly pluck them from the stem as we talk, the flesh firm under our fingers.
A few days after our chat, TeZATalks will finally release her debut LP, Black Girl American Horror Story. The record, roughly three years in the works, is both similar to and nothing like the twin EPs - 2017’s Chaos and 2019’s Apart to Chaos - that once defined her as a merchant of moody, lowered-brim EDM. That part of her exists here, but it’s just one facet of a thrilling 18-track epic spanning nü-metal, trap and electronic, a cocktail she’s labeled “hardcore pop.” It dazzles in its sense of scope, both sonically and thematically - rarely can an artist balance artifice and authenticity without falling off the beam, but Thomas manages just that.
It’s also a showcase for just how mercurial she is as a performer. Save for one guest vocal, it’s wholly her behind the mic as she contorts her voice into braggadocio, aggression, and vulnerability wherever the material calls for it. She’s the monster with the mask on “ELVIRA”; she’s the girl with the hued highlights and the covered wrists on “EMOTIONAL O.D.”; she’s parked in the passenger seat, one spindly leg stretched out, on “GOODGRRL.” Much of its runtime, at least at first, is Thomas stretching herself to the limit: showing off, quickly changing costumes, attempting another exorcism against whatever demons might be quivering inside her psyche.
I remember, as we settle down and I press record, her eyes immediately meeting mine. The gaze of a stranger is usually something to avoid when you live in a big city, but in an interview setting I know it’s an opportunity. I remind myself of this as I fight to return her gaze, trying to catch a glimpse of her soul as she speaks about her life and the circumstances that led her to make music as TeZATalks.
I’m still terrible at it, but I can tell it burns. It’s the same energy radiating off her as she rages on stage and kickstarts the mosh pit. There’s a resilience there, one born of real trauma that crosses the distance artistic license lends. Black Girl American Horror Story might occasionally treat its central conceit through the lens of camp - embodying a white-eyed harlequin on “WEIRDO” and running down the monster movie canon on “ELVIRA” and simulating voguing at a Gaga concert on “MONSTER STRUT” - but when TeZATalks speaks about “horror,” it’s through a place of deep familiarity.
What Thomas has been through, the pressure and pain, is not unlike the way a black pearl - the rarest of its kind - is formed, deep in the belly of the ocean where unfamiliar terrors stalk the waters, cradled eternally in the dark.
Born in Missouri and raised in Oahu, Thomas is a child of an orator. “My dad’s a politician,” she says. “When I first came back from the island, I had a very heavy Pidgin accent. When I get drunk, it definitely comes out!,” she says, laughing. “And so he was like, ‘Not my little girl!’ I think that obviously is a part of how I present myself: not to be heard more, but to just make sure I'm articulating where I'm coming from.” Indeed: Thomas answers each of my questions eloquently, pausing before speaking and picking her words carefully.
The Pidgin accent is but one remnant of her Hawaii-based childhood. “Growing up in Oahu is 100% why I am the way that I am,” she says. “The "aloha" spirit is something that is infectious. People don't shy away from embracing who you are, and they also don't shy away from being who they are. That allowed me to grow up in an environment where the last thing I ever thought about was my outside appearance. It was always about the way I felt when I was around people, and how I made others feel. I got to be a kid for a long time. I still very much hold that truth to my spirit.”
Thomas discovered her voice the way so many children do: in the church. “I spent a lot of my time in a small little Baptist church that had one of the best choirs on the island,” she attests. “My mom, when she first moved to Oahu, gravitated towards the church, and not in a religious aspect. It wasn't like how we fear some of what religion has become in society. It was community; it was safe, and it was consistent.
“The first time that I heard someone not only sing but project this energy that transformed the audience, I think that's when I fell in love with music.”
Photo by Emery Lemos.
Before Thomas ever even dreamed of projecting that energy herself, she was an athlete. Specifically, she was the fastest girl on the island, certainly fast enough to grow into a career as a track star. Her dreams, however, would be shattered at fifteen years old by a case of scoliosis.
“I went in for a checkup after I got my arm broken in a soccer tournament,” she says, “and they found a severe curve that was leaning towards my heart.”
The doctors ordered immediate surgery, realigning her spine via metal rods and screws. “The doctor said I was gonna wake up and feel different,” she recalls. “and when I woke up, I felt the most pain that I have ever felt in my life. Not because of the surgery, but because of the itching. I was in the bed for so long I got bed sores, and afterward I was in a wheelchair for a few months.”
Though the surgery saved her life, it also put Thomas in an unfamiliar situation of limitation. “All of a sudden, this athletic mindset that was connected to my body was gone, and it scared me. Having to be young trying to understand why this was happening and not knowing how to physically deal with it...I gave up rehabilitation. I tried to run afterward, and I tried to jump, and I ended up cracking a screw in my back because this girl was trying to egg me on.” She would eventually heal fully, but the damage caused by her impatience hindered her recovery, both dashing her prospects as an athlete and planting the seed of what would become a severe depression.
If an operation saved her physical health, music would end up save her sanity. Her creative impulses would emerge upon moving from the island to the continent and attending Curtis Senior High School. The move was a culture shock at first - “I showed up in a big T shirt and flip flops on a cold day at a majority Mormon school,” but she pushed through it by joining all three choirs, signing up for musical theater, and befriending her fellow drama kids (which included a young Shaina Shepherd). After earning her first solo, on “Seasons of Love,” from Rent, Thomas was hooked.
“From that point, I fell in love with this side of me that could never be expressive in the way that sports could,” she says. “Being in that environment opened me up to who I really am, not only as an artist, but just as a person.” That meant not only acknowledging her gifts as an artist, but coming to terms with the forces that would eventually shape her art: her sexuality, her identity as a Black woman, and her budding challenges with mental health.
There's so much music that I want to study and pay homage to, but I also want to stay true to what naturally of comes out of me. And that’s Hardcore Pop.
Photo by Emery Lemos.
Thomas also points back to an event she hosted as a graduation requirement - a charity bash called “Can You Feel The Music” - as a direct link to Black Girl American Horror Story’s wide range. “I had a bill with tons of different artists,” she says. “I had a cellist, I had hip hop, Shaina performed, I had dancers...it feels like an interesting impression on where we are now.”
That tracks for an album that’s willing to embrace anything and everything, from styles to moods to formats. The record’s earliest moments replicate 2010s hip-hop, from the menacing “ELVIRA” to the bratty trap of “DON’T CALL MY PHONE,” the latter of which sees Thomas punctuating a chorus with a sharp “bitch” like a sonar ping. The electric guitars come out on “STOPIT!” and “BREAKSHIT,” both songs rife with distorted chugs and pinched harmonics that lay over the ominous low-end of an 808. And those are just the first few songs: over its runtime, she weaves Kirill Polyanskiy’s violin (“WEIRDO”), Daym’s shimmering guitar (“THE REVENGE,”), Poison Jams’ ballroom thump (“MONSTER STRUT”) and Jack Gravalis’ tender guitar (“HOLD MY HAND”) into the mix. It makes the LP a twin thrill: to discover the path taken and to witness the exactness of its execution.
Even back then Thomas envisioned music like a buffet, with no style or genre off limits. Plenty of people are born with perfect pitch, but Thomas clearly had something a little more advanced: the ability to analyze and enact a style, both in sound and in aesthetic. The music then was purer, just notes and melodies and energies interweaved in infinite harmonious ways.
It wasn’t yet a commodity to sell bright-eyed talent, which is what her reality would eventually become.
With her musical ambitions set in stone, Thomas started wondering what a career in music might look like. “I was very ambitious,” she recalls. “I wanted to learn how to be a better songwriter, how to be a better artist. But not for myself, just more to answer the question of, ‘If you are an artist, what does it look like?’
“Looking back, if I had a redo of awareness, I think I would have waited,” she says. She takes a beat, then repeats it for emphasis, her eyes off to the side. “I think I would have waited.”
Thomas’ eagerness to enter the entertainment industry started with a signing to John Robert Powers. The agency asks prospective clients to sign “contracts” and shell out for exorbitant fees in exchange for amateur, usually outdated classes. (This, purportedly, is a predatory practice shared by many of its ilk; legitimate agencies work on commissions, only asking for payment after their clients have achieved success because they understand the luck involved in acquiring gigs.) Through JRP, Thomas competed in the International Presentation of Performers, also known as IPOP. Though it’s also not worth the fees, the event does give its competitors the opportunity to perform in front of legitimate talent scouts. The year she competed, according to Thomas, she won the whole competition. “That sent me on a trajectory of ‘Fuck school, now I'm just gonna go to L.A.,’” she says. “I didn't know what I was doing. I just said, “I’m going to L.A.” Just seventeen at the time, she packed her bags and drove to California.
Instead of a traditional college experience, Thomas pursued acting school. At first she attended AMDA, the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, but was kicked out after just a year for a pair of reasons. The more reasonable one was that she lied on her physical about her scoliosis surgery because she wanted to take ballet. (“I would have been a liability with the rods.”) The other, less fair reason was that she faced accusations of being a Satanist.
“I wasn’t a Satanist,” she says. “It's because I auditioned for something that you weren't supposed to as a first year. I got it, and then I was like, ‘Oh, if I can do this, I can do that again,’ and then people started making up rumors about me and leaving things at my door...but it’s a theater school!” she exclaims about face. “If the drama isn't there, are we actually in theater school?”
She quickly moved on to a certificate program at the Musician’s Institute in the heart of Hollywood Boulevard. There she met several lifetime friends, including her current drummer Henry McDaniel as well as songwriter Forchette, who’s currently lounging behind us on a couch with her phone in her hands. Yet despite the connections she made, Thomas still struggled to achieve the success she knew she was capable of.
Her big break wouldn’t come until the end of 2012, years after she first moved to the City of Angels. By that point she was unhoused, driving her car between gigs and then sleeping in it afterward. At the same time, she had signed to a production company led by a husband-and-wife team that attempted to sell her talent to the majors. “I got introduced to different ways you could be shopped in different categories of artists, and I got put into the ‘Whitney Houston’ category, because I was this little girl with a big voice,” she says. “So I went through several situations where I was being put in studios to demo things out or to show off.”
In the early 2010s, the hot topic in the entertainment industry was the nascent rise of social media and its ability to quickly make stars out of its users. Justin Bieber’s meteoric ascent may have been machinated by Scooter Braun, but it had originally been kickstarted by a series of viral singing videos on YouTube. Thomas had no such imprint on YouTube; her producer wanted to correct that. “I was being promised to RCA,” she attests, “and it would help the advance deal if you could say that, before this artist signs to us, we have something.”
The producer suggested she do a mashup of popular songs in 2012 to demonstrate her vocal talents. She obliged, singing over spliced-together karaoke versions of contemporary hits, from Flo Rida’s “Wild Ones” to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe.” Savvily, they made sure to include an outlier: a clip of “I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston, who had died months prior. “I thought, okay, maybe if I throw in a Whitney Houston rendition, it could elevate it more,” she says. “And she’d passed away. Why not?” Sitting in a spare bedroom at her producer’s house, she recorded take after take of the mashup until she got it perfect. “It was the 37th take that you heard,” she tells me.
Photo by Emery Lemos.
From the moment I mention the video, Thomas’ speech slows, her brisk cadence faltering. I figured it could have been anxiety around reconciling the artist behind “BREAKSHIT” and “SILYMI” with the woman happily belting out fun.’s “Some Nights” into a desktop camera. “From that perspective of being 21 and having this wonderful opportunity - Christina Milian was in and out of the studio, Chris Brown, Seven, all these different celebrities - I thought that me choosing to be Black Katy Perry or Whitney Houston was cool,” she explains.
Right after uploading the video to YouTube, Thomas returned to the PNW for a family emergency; her grandmother had died. “I didn't really care about much when that happened. She was very important to me.” The next day, she discovered the video had hit the main page of YouTube. “I woke up and my friend Darryl Cruz called me and said, ‘You're on the Huffington Post.’ My family was all excited. I've never seen so many relatives fly in.” Internet virality back then was still novel; it meant something significant. Very quickly, Thomas became a hot commodity for the labels to which her producer was trying to pitch. “All of a sudden I have a whole entire PR team. I think I was just trying to be happy and grateful, and also like, ‘What is going on?’”
She didn’t know at the time that her producer had started a bidding war between Disney, Interscope, Columbia, any major label imprint that believed Thomas could be the next Jepsen or Bieber. But by then he had already taken the reins; behind the scenes he controlled all of her social media accounts, carefully managing her image as a “teenage” up-and-comer. His stratagem paid off when he and Thomas flew to New York to finalize the publishing deal he had negotiated. “When we got to New York, the deal was that I would take the publishing deal and I would sign with whoever had the highest offer,” she says. “The deal that I was in with him, if I were to have signed it - which would have eventually been with Def Jam at the time - was for seven and a half years and $1.5 million in advance.”
“But,” she says, her words slowing to a croak, “the night before...he decided to do something to me that completely changed everything.”
The day after, Thomas sat in the label office, visibly distressed. The A&R representative at the label could tell something was wrong, and he spoke up. “He said, ‘There's a bathroom down the hall and a door, or you can sign this seven and a half year deal.
“When the person I was with came back and we were ready to sign, I asked to use the bathroom and I left.”
Helpless, Thomas booked an immediate flight back to L.A. She spent the months afterward privately coping with the trauma. “When I got back, I tried to do what I do all the time, just ‘Everything's fine.’” “Fine” meant a gradual descent into hard drug use as she attempted to cut herself off completely from her violator, going so far as to appeal for a restraining order. But the man’s presence haunted her in more ways than one.
“At the time,” she says. “he paid for my lawyer. I didn't know anything about how that worked, where if the lawyer is getting paid by someone else, then that lawyer works for them, not me. And so I signed my legal name away to him.”
Refusing to sign the deal in New York, it turns out, meant she had broken the obligations of her contract. “For about five years, I wasn't allowed to sing under my own name, go in recording studios, none of that. I started a band in Hollywood to even be able to perform in an underground speakeasy.”
Months later, after a stint in rehab where she successfully recovered from her addiction, Thomas came to grips with her situation. Thomas had tried to follow her dreams, and the chase had left her winded. The light that had been lit all those years ago in that Baptist church in Oahu had been reduced to cinders. She needed to leave her life in L.A. behind. She returned home.
“I don't mind it crossing now,” she says after a beat. “You know, Tasia Ann Thomas is who I am and who I've been, and TeZATalks was who I created to get through so much of what that time period was. I didn't know how much I was...not okay from all of it, and I felt like that showed in the music...”
“But...there was a lot that he took from me, and I fought to...still love this, and still...I dunno, be a person, kind...”
Thomas’ gaze disconnects from mine and lands anywhere else: down to the floor, to the lines in the wooden table, straight ahead to a spot on the wall. Suddenly she can’t find her words anymore. In their place are tears, two heavy drops that roll down the creases of her eyes, to be burned forever into my brain.
When Thomas landed in the PNW, making music was the farthest thing from her mind. The person who would bring it back into her life was Steven Trueba, aka ALTER., though at the time produced beats under the name CANDLIGHT.
Trueba first met Thomas at his job, working at an Apple Store in Tacoma. His corporate-mandated camaraderie soon turned into a fleeting connection between creative souls. “He was saying that if any artists come in, let them know about me,” she recalls. “And I didn't come and say that I was an artist, I just said that I was looking to build a studio in my home. I was just making small talk, just [hanging] around the store, but they gave me his card. I ended up talking to him, and then we became friends and he got to know me.”
In the early days of their friendship, which would gradually blossom into a romance, Thomas never revealed her musical past. Inklings of her talent nevertheless started to trickle out. “One day he was like, ‘You have a really pretty voice. You don't want to sing or nothing?’” She refused.
She did connect him to some L.A. friends, including Forchette, and soon Trueba was making regular trips to the city to work with them. One trip, she bravely decided to visit friends in the city, and Trueba tagged along. He came face to face with gushing testimonials about her singing ability. “Everybody inside the apartment was talking to him about me, you know, ‘You don't know that she sings? Oh my god,’ all of this. And he's like, ‘No, I heard her, but nothing to this level.’”
When the couple returned to Washington, Trueba pleaded with Thomas. Why? Why wouldn’t she sing? “He was patient with me,” she says. “He would take me on walks, because I had really bad anxiety and everything. I was always worried about the contract and whatnot.” Eventually, after opening up about her situation, she watched as Trueba put together a typically beautiful piece, and decided she’d contribute vocals to it. The piece was called “Kill Your Butterflies.”
That was the moment TeZATalks was born.
“From that point on, we made music every single day,” she says. “We didn't stop.”
Hunkered down in a basement, in a house owned by Trueba’s godparents, the couple obsessed about making music. “There was no structure to anything ever,” she says. “It was a lot of play.” They constantly watched TED Talks and tutorials, paid close attention to the release of packs and plugins they could play with, and spent whole hours doing field recording. “We spent so much time in that fucking basement, it was crazy.”
Those basement sessions would produce the very first TeZATalks songs, all of which operate in a dewy, brooding headspace, all minor key progressions and sonorous electronic drum hits and andante tempos: the sonic equivalent of angst under a lowered hoodie. It’s the kind of music Thomas needed at the time, a new avenue for her to explore the pain she had been left with.
Two of TeZATalks’ earliest singles, “Resurrection,” and “Had,” capture this perfectly. “Resurrection” is an apt title for a debut single; in its first verse, Thomas documents the past - from the death of her grandmother to her drug addiction to her short-lived YouTube vitality - and follows it with a chorus that declares her intention to revive herself (“Don’t break, back down; don't move, rise now, the real truth/This is only the beginning of my true resurrection”).
“Had,” meanwhile, hones in on the harrowing mechanics of a toxic relationship: how habituation and fear can be confused for love, and how even the deepest cuts can create a stronger person. Embedded in both songs is Thomas’ uncanny ability - an ability present all across her discography - to cast her personal struggles in a relatable light.
So relatable, in fact, that Thomas earned another smash on YouTube without even realizing it. By 2016, YouTube had become a cultural juggernaut, and the most relevant tastemakers were the ones with trusted voices who could directly recommend music to their followers. One such tastemaker, a woman named Bella who lived in Germany and helmed a channel called xKito Music, discovered “Had” and posted it to the channel in October 2015. The song quickly racked up hits, and soon after, Trueba and Thomas signed to Hegemon and Artist Intelligence Agency, labels associated with electronic promotional juggernaut EDM.com. The labels gave them a platform with which they could benefit from a budding mass trend of chill, moody electronic music, and in a flash of luck Thomas suddenly had yet another audience of millions - for an entirely different genre of music. It justifiably freaked her out at first, but she had the distance of an alter ego to help circumvent the stifling effect of the contract.
That name - TeZATalks - was originally just “Teza,” a facetious response to Starbucks’ baristas consistently getting her name wrong on orders. But because of an error in promotion, the word “Talks” had been appended to the credits of a single, and she decided to roll with the punch.
The next few years saw Trueba and Thomas making the most out of their Internet hot streak. In 2016, the couple traveled to a scenic studio in Hood River, Oregon to record the material for their debut EP Chaos. The EP encapsulated the sound they’d successfully honed while letting local PNW musicians and beat makers into the picture, from Qreepz to Kody Khemis to guitarist Kody Ryan. Later would come the second grand product of their partnership, the nine-song Apart to Chaos, which is exactly as its name describes: an extension, even an augmentation, of Chaos.
Among the pair’s many releases, Chaos’ closing track, “STFD,” hit particularly rich dirt, generating over a million streams in short fashion. To this day, it’s still TeZATalks’ most popular song - to the chagrin of Thomas, not only because the edgy ode to self-worth no longer represents where her artistry has traveled (“I think I'm never gonna do another ‘STFD,’ she says, having had to perform the hit ad nauseam) but also because the deal she had signed with AIA had given them 50% of the master royalties.
Indeed, though Trueba had given Thomas an opportunity to hash out her traumas and return to music, it would take much longer for Thomas to get to the point of creative agency that Black Girl American Horror Story represents. In retrospect, she was just trying to hold on at first, always in fear of that damned contract and its adjudicator reentering her life.
“Steven just allowed space for me to give as much as I could at the time,” she says. “I couldn't give everything. And he wasn't really into a lot of the stuff that I probably would be doing now, at that time. He just really wanted to do what he wanted to do, and I had a really cool way of fitting in.”
Over time, Trueba’s and Thomas’ relationship, both creatively and romantically, ran its course. “Unfortunately, we grew into people who no longer see eye to eye,” she says. “But there’s still love there.” (Today, Trueba splits his time between music production and exploring the limits of generative AI art.) Their time together produced an enormous backlog of songs, two of which - “BOTH SIDES” and “RIGHT BRAIN” - appear on Black Girl American Horror Story. If you listen closely, it’s easy to detect his signature moodiness behind the tracks, even if it’s just as easy to delineate them as chrome-smooth outliers on an overall untethered record.
Still, they’re the most obvious link back to the beginning of TeZATalks, as intended. “It was very important for me to honor the evolution from Chaos and Apart to Chaos, to still keep that sonic touch intact,” says Thomas.
Crucially, TeZATalks being a collaboration meant that Thomas could experiment with a new version of herself as a pop star, albeit one with an “alternative” edge - prismatic hair dye, tattooed skin, piercings, leather and lace, a serrated edge. Gradually, as she dipped her toes back into the waters of live performance - first at a Ryan Caraveo album release show at the Showbox in December 2016, and then later debuting as TeZATalks at Upstream Music Festival in May 2017 - she regained her confidence.
Though it would take time for her to forge the path she’s on now, the fire had been resparked. Thomas’ true resurrection had begun.
The TeZATalks that we now know started forming in early February 2020, amid another period of intense pressure.
That evening, Thomas was singing at a SoFar Sounds show when she caught her mother, who was in the audience, looking concerned. I assumed, when she mentioned it to me, that it was from a news article about the coming COVID pandemic. It wasn’t.
“That night, I found out that my grandpa, the pillar of our family, was dying,” she says.
Both of Thomas’ grandfathers were notable Black leaders individually. Her dad’s father had worked with Martin Luther King Jr. to advocate for Black homeownership in segregated white neighborhoods. Her mom’s father, meanwhile, was one of the first Black men to lead an all-white brigade in the U.S. military. As she returned home to quarantine with her mother and teenage sister, she witnessed just how much of a structural beam the latter had been on her family.
“When the world shut down, I spent every day watching as he slowly started to leave,” she says. “During that time, I saw so much. I watched my mom, who I've never seen in that light, all of a sudden be the child and little girl and vulnerable daughter that she was before she had me. I saw my sister fall into a deep depression because my grandpa acted as the only male figure in her life, and she had to get put on suicide watch. I watched my uncle's alcoholism, till this day, just take him. Wet brain, not even there. He was just so much of what was holding my world together because we would have Sunday dinner every time. We would celebrate birthdays at the same table that my mom and my uncles grew up and ate at, in the same house where they were the only Black people on the street. There was so much tradition in my life that just left.
“And what was so fucking upsetting,” she punctuates, “was the fact that you couldn't have people at a funeral! So we're sitting in this room with my grandpa's dead body and all these people on a Zoom call, and it's cold. No honor, no respect.”
All of this, on top of the twin crises of COVID and the George Floyd protests, sent Thomas into a familiar spiral of despair. “It was just such a polarizing moment of like, ‘I hate life. I actually hate it. I hate everything.’ I was so angry, and I didn't know what to do with any of it. And I didn't want to go and do drugs again, I didn't want to relapse into a person that never benefited me.”
“there was this character that was born…I was like, I want to be her if we're never gonna see the light of day again. Because this bitch rocks.
Photo by Emery Lemos.
The difference was that she now had the wisdom, and the toolset, to keep that despair from destroying her. Though TeZA’s ingratiation with the greater Seattle area would take a little longer compared to her near-instant notoriety online, she had made plenty of local artist friends over the years. One of those friends, Alex Alexander - a multimedia creative who goes by LexScope - reached out and offered Thomas a regular spot on a new podcast called Legendary Linkups. The plan was that he, she, and a third artist would hang out and drink on camera, as a way to find some catharsis amidst quarantine life.
That third person was the aforementioned Sinclair, a rapper/producer who had been practicing beat-making as Poison Jams since his teenage years. While Thomas was reintroducing herself as TeZATalks, he’d been participating in Bellingham’s restless music scene, regularly collaborating with the college town’s hip-hop enthusiasts. By the first episode of Legendary Linkups, Sinclair had a studio in Renton, and he was dealing with his own troubles. The two bonded fast, and soon Sinclair expressed an eagerness for Thomas to work in his studio.
Thomas was justifiably distracted. “I wasn't making music,” she says of the time. “Black Girl American Horror Story wasn't even conceptualized, it wasn't even a fucking thought. There was just so much fucking loss: my mom losing her house, friends dying from overdosing at parties...everything all at fucking once.” Even when Thomas finally obliged Sinclair’s request, it was tough going. “I barely could even get in the booth, because I was just so...whatever the fuck I was.”
But a track that bubbled up during the sessions, “Lex Luthor,” provided an intriguing path. It wasn’t just the newfound presence of chunky guitars on the beat; the track, produced by GRAMMY-nominated Tacoma producer Blakk Soul, found Thomas applying more personality into her vocals, stretching her voice into a demented squeal, firing off bars on the verse, and letting loose an irresistible “Yahhhh” between refrains.
“From ‘Lex Luthor,’ there was this character that was born,” she says. “There was something about the heaviness and the grit, but also the hip-hop, because I also did not consider myself a rapper.” It’s an important point to mention; at that point, save for one-off 2019 single “Kinko” and her staccato cadence on Apart to Chaos cut “Panic Attack,” Thomas hadn’t quite rapped, and especially in such an incendiary way. It was Sinclair who helped spur her on, as well as her own desire to redraw her limits. “I was like, I want to be her if we're never gonna see the light of day again. Because this bitch rocks.”
The song ended up launching Thomas out of her funk and into the furnace. With Sinclair as her guiding light, she started the lengthy process of evolving, crawling into a spiky cocoon and growing her wings. Part of that process was finding GiiiRLBAND, a group of young adults - led by sisters Abby and Lily Rouillard and Gemma Cross - holding down a production studio at Platinum Reign in Tacoma. They helped Thomas put together a music video for “Lex Luthor” that catalyzed her vision, and soon after they’d continue to collaborate with Thomas over the next few years, helping her choreograph shows, fashion a new image, and contribute to a single called “NOT YOUR BODY” in the wake of the Roe v. Wade overturn.
She also started hitting up old collaborators for fuel, and they obliged - albeit with material that matched the old TeZA. What she really wanted was a change in direction. “A lot of people were sending me more electronic stuff, and I was like, ‘Guys, I can't. I don't even know who that girl is anymore. Let it die.’ I mean I couldn’t abandon the fans, so keeping that electro-pop side was critical. I just wanted to do it in a way where I'm not going to make it about necessarily, ‘It's electronic.’ I wanted to make it more about this side of me that people haven't been introduced to yet.”
The first sign of that new side would come in early 2023, first with a searing cover of Limp Bizkit’s “Break Stuff,” and then with her own updated take on nü-metal, “BREAKSHIT.” The Limp Bizkit cover was an important step in the process, not only as an announcement of artistic intention. Thomas had been enchanted by the recent Woodstock ‘99 documentary and wanted to evoke that feeling of freedom, just from a viewpoint that wouldn’t have been possible in that hypermasculine era. Nü-metal, even if it’s one of the most misunderstood musical movements in American musical history, still earned a reputation as music of a particular flavor of violence. In some way, Thomas aimed to twist that narrative.
“I mean there have been women that have covered it on YouTube,” she says. “Not Black women. It means something totally different to me, and the representation of it means something totally different. Fuck the wow factor, but it's the fact that the representation is there to now let something that has already been a timeless song live on in more dimensions of time.”
“BREAKSHIT” is a little less immediate than its inspiration, but it still stuns as a sharp left turn from an artist known mostly for chilling out the room. On the chorus, Thomas ekes out a gravelly rap, while on the verses she flips to melodicism, oscillating between an Amy Lee-like whisper and an emotive litany of the trials that plagued her quarantine, and beyond. “You don't know pain 'til you see your own family sleeping, wishing that they would get up,” she cries pointedly.
“BREAKSHIT,” would end up being Step 1 on her progression toward becoming an alt-rock princess. Over the next two years, she churned out images, videos, and performances that honed in on a Gothic aesthetic while using her musical range to flesh out that direction. “BREAKSHIT” led into the menacing “ELVIRA,” and then into the churning anti-racist screed “SILYMI,” and then into the infectious femme queer anthem “GOODGRRL” and the fire-starting “STOPIT!” All of them, linked sonically by Sinclair’s deft mixing work, felt like individual pieces in a fashion collection, one defined by polychromatism, cinches, straps, fresh tats, and two middle fingers raised in the air.
And yet the biggest surprise might be the softer side that appears across Black Girl American Horror Story’s glacial second half. Outside of the two melancholy Trueba tracks and the inclusion of 2022’s “OXYGEN”, there’s the sparse ballad “HOLD MY HAND,” which boasts the only guest vocal on the record, a verse sung by PUBLIC YOUTH’s Jordan Rogers. There’s also the harrowing denouement “COPS,” which tonally feels a mile away from the album’s introductory rave-up. Amid mournful piano and Polyanskiy’s violin, Thomas layers her voice into a choir of ghosts as she gracefully weaves her personal pain into a greater tapestry of Black American tragedy.
“No one can say that they don't know what's going on in relation to Black people and the cops,” she explains. “But I felt that the history of it - how it has been taught over time - has always been very divisive and very much of blame. And don't get me wrong, there's definitely blame there, but when it keeps only becoming about the cops, we lose every single person's life and their legacy and their impression. We lose their story. We don't even know their names anymore. I mean, yeah, we have ‘Say Her Name,’ but we only have a few, because that's what made it to the mainstream. Where did everybody else go? So I felt there was this constant message of, ‘How do I still express my frustration and my hurt and my desire for change without being divisive, but to gain the attention for understanding?’”
By the track’s end, Thomas raises her voice to a clamor and her choir follows, her words - “This is the story telling their story” - stress an ultimate focus on the album’s narrative; a Black girl, her pain, and the resolution that has yet to come. It’s a bittersweet triumph; a cap to a record that finally makes the most of a brilliant creative voice, but wrapped in the terrifying notion that the scars earned in the process have yet to fully heal, if they ever will at all.
Though I’d like to, we can’t talk forever. Thomas has a routine to practice and a production to oversee, and she’s already enervated from spilling her soul to me. I’m drained myself, and as I hug her goodbye, I can feel the weight of her tribulations on my own as I walk south down the border of Lake Union. Thomas has a way with that, of offering a piece of herself to whomever deserves it. She seems to hold an endless supply.
The next day, finally on stage at Neumos after a week of rigorous rehearsal - indeed, after over three years of preparation - she stands still on stage with the microphone in hand and passes out a piece of herself to every member of the audience. Painted eyes closed, she belts out a vibrato, classical in nature, against a wave of self-recorded voices in harmony. Her hand moves with the rising and falling of her voice, tracing years of highs and lows, peril and persistence; it stuns the crowd silent.
That song, the climatic, Max Richter-inspired “PERLA NERA,” is Thomas’ favorite of the record. It originally surfaced from Thomas’ doubts about the completeness of her vision, despite the record already having been declared finished. “I kept having these feelings that there was something missing,” she says, “an element of the horror or the story or me that needed to be expressed.” Then she met Gravalis at Cafe Racer’s Seraphim open mic, and the guitarist quickly integrated himself into the world of the record. One night, around 4AM, he sent her an instrumental he had written. Inspired, and still awake by then, she immediately shot out of bed and recorded vocals.
“Perla nera,” if you weren’t aware, means “black pearl” in Italian. “My grandmother used to sing a song called “Black Pearl,” she says, then fires off a line from it. “Black pearl/pretty little girl/let me lift you up where you belong. She used to sing it to my mom, my mom used to sing it to me, and I sang it to my sister.” In dedication, Thomas, who routinely acquires a new tattoo every Valentine’s Day, ordered the word “pearl” to be etched onto her breastbone.
I remember, as she says it, catching myself glancing back down again at the tattoo, defiant in its spiky black lettering. I don’t know why. Even though it has faded into a dark moniker, I thought I sensed a glimmer of light reflected back in the ink.
Photo by Abby Rouillard.