Alice Longyu Gao wish to depart this world looking for one other. In truth, she’s truly been fairly busy constructing her personal — Alice Longyu Gao World — the place she’s the president, working on a platform that advocates for LGBTQ+ rights, a CEO championing creative imaginative and prescient and variety, and the resident party starter, offering splashy hyperpop beats.
“I’m so curious about how humanity and systems work, and the more I get to know it, the more I realize the system wasn’t built for women, the system wasn’t built for minorities’ success, it wasn’t even built for non-English speakers,” Alice Longyu Gao says. “Because the programs weren’t constructed for LGBTQ+ youngsters’ success, the world wasn’t constructed to perceive us, I needed to invent a self-sustainable world — system — for myself, my neighborhood.”
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While many artists set out to create a cohesive concept within their music, both sonically and aesthetically, few do it as deftly as Longyu Gao. With her colorful alt-dance music, maximalist fashion, and DJ sets and live events like Alice the Club, it really is as if the queer NYC-and-LA-based recording artist is establishing, not just a world, but an entire sonic universe where queer people can thrive. And it doesn’t just feel all-encompassing in her art — Alice Longyu Gao World is like a more idyllic, more fun version of our own reality.
[Photo by Stolenbesos, Astra Zero]
It’s right there in the title of the Bengbu, China-born artist’s “second debut EP,” Let’s Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire, which just dropped today. The release follows up 2021’s High Dragon and Universe EP and a series of singles, and features collaborations with Dylan Brady of 100 gecs (they previously worked together on her viral track “Rich Bitch Juice”).
Although Longyu Gao defies genre (“Come 2 Brazil” is a bumping rap in which she spits cheeky bars about how clouted she is, while “Hëłlœ Kįttÿ” is pure bubblegum-screamo chaos), she’s an artist in the distinctly online hyperpop scene who is all about bringing her beats live and letting go.
“It’s all about individuals getting collectively,” Longyu Gao says about her music and lifestyle of DJ-ing event after event. Like many other hyperpop artists, she feels like she “exploded” a bit online during lockdown, which is when she began hosting her Zoom club nights that raised funds for LGBTQ+ performers, but now she sees the IRL space as perhaps the most important part of her “world.” She describes the way she thinks about everything she does and the parties she throws as like building a community from the ground up. She says, “Think about making a nation, proper? You acquired to have the hospital, you bought to have the newspaper.” What’s especially essential to her? You simply have “acquired to have the membership.”
Like many New York transplants before her, Longyu Gao was drawn to how many people there formed their own families, and felt a desire to “nurture her neighborhood.” Originally, the recording artist grew up in a mid-sized city in China, where she studied classical piano. She says, “I’m the black sheep of my household and the area for me to be who I’m was fairly small at the place I grew up. Therefore, I wanted to depart.”
Like many New York transplants, outcasts, and disenfranchised kids before her, much of her desire to “nurture her neighborhood” comes from Longyu Gao feeling as if she needed to find her own family. The recording artist grew up in a mid-sized city in China, a bit disconnected from her family who she says wanted a son and never quite understood her knack for creativity, aside from her studies of classical piano. She says, “I’m the black sheep of my household and the area for me to be who I’m was fairly small at the place I grew up. Therefore, I wanted to depart.”
Eventually, she went to university in Boston, but finally found herself, and where she really fit in, in New York. “It’s like this for a lot of New Yorkers. Most persons are not from New York, however like as soon as they arrive to New York, ‘Well, can I am going again to, like, Idaho? Probably not.'”
There, in the late 2010s, she worked in various creative industries like fashion, but became “hooked on the hustle” in figuring out how to make money by DJing — playing party after party and experimenting as much as possible while producing original tracks. Eventually, that nightlife space, particularly with other queer artists and fans, is where she found her niche. She says, “I used to be like, ‘Wait, my purpose isn’t just to earn money and survive. My purpose is to construct a world.'”
Now, you know when you walk into an NYC party and Longyu Gao is behind the decks. Sure, the DJ is instantly recognizable, dressed in a dress with puffy sleeves or feathers, her hair in bows or coiffed in spikes, but she’s always working the crowd with jaw-drop-worthy pop remixes.
Years ago, she even caught the attention of A$AP Rocky at an Art Basel event in Miami that she was booked at and played AQUA’s “Barbie Girl.” “It was a lot,” she says, but weeks later she was stunned when A$AP approached her at a NYFW event to tell her, “I need to do a party collectively, let’s play ‘Barbie.'” While nothing ever came of it and her DM attempts failed, last year, Longyu Gao finally ran into him again — this time one night on Canal Street in which she felt compelled to approach him, show off her tattoo dedicated to A$AP Mob, and ask if he remembered her. That moment, and the first time she played Brooklyn’s Elsewhere, opening for 100 gecs on their first-ever tour, she counts as the full-circle, extremely New York moments that assure her that she and her world are on the right track.
Longyu Gao may only be putting out her “second debut” EP, with a third on the way later this spring, but Alice Longyu Gao World isn’t at all short of its world-building. Each one of her visuals is like a fashion-fairy fantasia; her eye-catching style often plays on gender, from masculine-CEO-ready looks that emphasize how much work she puts in as an independent artist to hyper-feminine stagewear; and her sound is like a pop-punk pixie princess was handed over the stage at a rave. On the very personal track “MONK” she sings, “Grandma, grandma cannot you see?/I’m a fucking prodigy/Grandma, grandma cannot you see?/I’m making historical past,” and it rings true, as if it’s her induction speech as the president of Alice Longyu Gao World.
While she’s poised to welcome even more citizens into her nation, she’s largely focused on trying to make queer audiences feel seen. She says, “It could be sick if I might be a stadium-type artist — but in addition, if I’m so self-sufficient to the extent of ‘Every single present it is like 500 individuals, at all times bought out, all people has enjoyable, I pays for my electrical energy payments,’ that sounds good to me, too. I needed to make this world for myself and my neighborhood.”
First her “second debut EP,” subsequent working a nation, codified LGBTQ+ rights, and well being take care of all.
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