Zeph’s debut studio album, character improvement, is nearing nearer. Through brutally sincere introspection and a willingness to overshare, the viral alt-pop artist is feeling extra assured than ever earlier than. That’s why it might be onerous to imagine that in her youthful days, she hardly spoke in any respect. Read an excerpt from the quilt story under, which seems in our 2023 summer time challenge, and seize limited-edition vinyl of her new album right here.
Zephani Jong didn’t really start speaking until she was 13 years old. Well, that’s a little bit of hyperbole — she did communicate to shut members of the family minimally when needed, however everybody else was out of the query. “The way I talk today, people would never guess I [didn’t speak before]. It’s crazy because now I sing for a living,” Jong, who performs beneath the stage identify Zeph, tells Alternative Press over a Zoom name following her first-ever cowl shoot.
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“I physically couldn’t make sound come out of my mouth, no matter how hard I tried. It started with me being really, really shy and anxious, and then I couldn’t get out of it because everyone knew me as the quiet one — not even quiet, but completely silent. I never spoke in front of people, and that’s all they knew of me,” Zeph remembers. She didn’t need to disturb folks’s notion of her, which in the end left her feeling trapped.
Now 24, Zeph later discovered her situation was resulting from an nervousness dysfunction referred to as selective mutism. It wasn’t until her senior 12 months in highschool that she lastly began speaking candidly out loud. Metamorphosing from the “quietest person” in her pal group to the “most talkative,” Zeph credit social media for serving to her open up. “Because I went on the internet a lot to talk to people, I found my own interests, beliefs and inspirations online. The internet really gave me a sense of independence.”
Social media has all the time been a essential a part of Zeph’s journey. Before she ever uploaded even one tune, Zeph had already amassed a big following from sharing her artwork on-line. She started importing fan artwork of musicians like Conan Gray and Billie Eilish to Instagram round 2017. A 12 months later, she went viral when BuzzFeed shared her sequence of Post-it Note doodles impressed by well-known viral Vines.
Today, Zeph has over 203,000 Instagram followers, and her posts are a smattering of colourful selfies and anime video clips set to snippets of her music. Her Twitter is rather more chaotic: an ever-growing assortment of cringe memes, inane shitposts and relatable overshares to over 186,000 followers. The solely factor you gained’t discover on Zeph’s Twitter anymore is somewhat blue checkmark now that account verification has shifted to Elon Musk’s controversial Twitter Blue. “I don’t care that it’s gone. It’s just annoying because now the only people who have it are the people who pay for it. The entire point of it is destroyed. It’s a fucking ego thing,” she says.
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