Tiffany Day Will Tell You Everything

Hoodie and skirt MEMORY NYC, shoes FANCI CLUBIt’s 2023, and I’m standing on the sloping floor of Gramercy Theater in Manhattan watching indie musician Tiffany Day do something very vulnerable. In the middle of a series of viral bedroom pop singles — sugary-sweet melodies laid out over titles like “IF I DON’T TEXT YOU FIRST” and “I’M OVERDRAMATIC AND I MISS YOU” — she breaks into a 10-minute dubstep set. I cannot emphasize enough that this set is hella random. Not the music itself — it’s a great selection, and Day’s stage presence is infectious — but the way she drops smack into the run of her first-ever headlining show. The reaction of the crowd, predominantly underage and sitting around the 5’2” mark, is mixed. Some people bob their heads in a vague appreciation, others look around to see if we should all be dancing to it or not. But this looks like the most fun Day has had on stage all night. She’s bouncing around, smiling, space buns vibrating. Top and shorts FENDIIt’s no surprise that, three years later, electronic music is the foundation of Day’s sophomore breakout album, Halo — a project that put her on the US Billboard Top Dance Albums chart, broke one million streams the day of its release, and inspired her first sold-out headlining tour. This year, Day has played Boiler Room in London, opened for Illennium at Red Rocks and Skrillex in Chicago, and reached over 1.6 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Three years ago, I think I paid less than $20 for my ticket; the only way I could get into the Halo tour was on the press list. On night one of her three-night run in New York City, amid the sweaty haze of Elsewhere in Brooklyn, fans were craning to get a good look at Day, a gentle mosh was undulating in the center of the dance floor, and neon 21+ bands flashed against a giant projection of Cinnamoroll. It was a very different crowd from the one I was a part of in 2023. But a lot of things are different now for Tiffany Day. When we meet at her hotel the next afternoon, the 26-year-old just woken up; she was up late playing the afters for her own concert as her DJ alter ego, Bass Fluff. It’s exciting, all this new audience energy. There are boys in the crowd now. There are moshers and budding degenerates and a new throng of ravers. “A lot of this tour was very much a huge expansion of my brain,” she says. “I poured everything into it.” Jacket, brooch, necklace COACHIn person, Day is not the anxiety-riddled thought daughter that she is in her lyrics (“If this is everything I’ve ever wanted / Why does it feel like something’s missing? / God I question, is this actually real?”). She’s energetic and inquisitive and funny. She talks with her hands in long, unbroken trains of thought. We have some of the same tattoos, she points out: a tiger and Chinese folk-style clouds on our forearms (she likes mine better, I like hers better, isn’t that life); she and her family play a lot of Mario Party; did I know that she cried within the first five minutes of watching the Mario movie? Not the new one, though; fun fact: she tolerates the heat and humidity of shows by imagining she’s in a Corepower Yoga class. Is she talking too much? Feel free to cut her the fuck off.“Can I feel your shoes?” she asks me maybe 60 seconds after we meet. “They look like they feel cool.” I tell her of course, and she puts a finger on my crinkled silver tabi flats. “Whoa.”That’s what’s so compelling about Tiffany Day: She invites you inside of her mind without hesitation. “I can’t be mysterious,” she says. “I love talking.” Like most of the post-internet generation of musicians, Day’s entire life can be traced online. Born in Toronto and raised in Wichita, Kansas, Day (whose given name is Tiffany Ruan) grew a YouTube following of 500,000 by posting covers to Top 40 songs like “Breakeven” by The Script and Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself.” She was also on Vine where a video of her singing into an Italian well went viral, temporarily turning her into a meme. She uploaded remixes to SoundCloud, posting edits and satire raps.Top vintage from ETCETERA, shorts ASHLEY WILLIAMS from RETAIL PHARMACY, socks CALZEDONIADress JENNY FAX, socks FALKEThe social media launchpad allowed Day to start releasing a series of singles. Her 2024 debut album, Lover Tofu Fruit, earned her a modest 10-city headlining tour. It was nothing to sneeze at, but it also came at great personal cost. The Gratitude Tour was entirely self-funded and self-produced, and it put her into $10,000 of credit card debt — something she has spoken openly about on social media.Worse, Lover Tofu Fruit wasn’t the artistic thesis that Day had hoped her debut album would be. Day took a year off after first tour, which she officially said was to rest, but candidly, she tells me, was also and largely because she couldn’t get work. “No one booked me,” she says. “It was a mixture of, I feel like the world will never see me as someone who belongs to anything. Also, I’m running out of money. Also, my fans expect one thing from me, but I don’t want to give it to them because I feel like I’ve outgrown it. It was all these things mixed together where I just felt so heavy.” Dress JENNY FAX, socks FALKEShe was ready to give it up, blow the dust off her biomedical engineering degree from Loyola Marymount, and get started on a civilian life. It was hard not to compare her standing to that of everyone else her age. “I had just graduated from college,” she recalls. “All my friends started their 9-to-5 jobs. These bitches were shopping at Aritzia, and I was like, ‘I feel so much FOMO. I want a desk, I want snacks in the kitchen.’ And I was like, ‘Maybe this is it for me.’ I genuinely was very much thinking about stopping my music career.”Race also played a part in her career crisis. The mid-2010s saw a small boom of guitar- and ukulele-strumming Asian lo-fi girls achieve niche internet success: beabadoobee, mxmtoon, NIKI, Lyn Lapid, Luna Li, Stephanie Poetri, Alex Porat. Some of them managed to break out into the mainstream as standalone indie pop artists, but a large number of them saw their Asianness become a part of their artistry, like it or not. Both the music industry and consumers have certain ideas about the kinds of artists who should be making certain genres of music. And when an artist doesn’t match those stereotypes, they’re often excluded, their work corralled into “identity” playlists and heritage-month posts.Day herself moved away from the overt Asian signals in her projects, with Lover Tofu Fruit giving way to Halo, Monolid metastasizing into Bass Fluff. I ask if she ever felt as though her race walked in the door before her work, in a way that felt more limiting than empowering. “Now that you say it, hell yeah!” she says. “One hundred percent. It’s more freeing to be considered a genre artist. Subconsciously, at the time, I probably couldn’t even understand what was going on. But it seemed like no one could break out [of the labels].”It’s not that Day hated indie pop as a concept. But after a while, it felt like she wasn’t allowed to turn anywhere else. It wasn’t until 2020 that she connected with producer Jack Hallenback, who worked across both Lover Tofu Fruit and Halo, that she realized she was allowed to try other things. “He’s the one who made me realize I love writing and making things that feel a little more electronic-inspired. It was hard because I was dropping singles here and there that were kind of—” she waves her hands “—hyper-pop-y, the Gex sort of sound. And nobody fucked with it. I was like, ‘Oh, these stream like shit.’”Dress JENNY FAXThey did, at first. Even her lead single off Halo, “AMERICAN GIRL,” underwhelmed. Day says it was the worst streaming debut of her career (now, it’s the most-streamed song on the album). No one seemed to understand it. “I went back to indie pop because it was like, ‘I guess that’s what people want from me,’” she says. “It went on for so long that I became miserable because all of the singles I was releasing, I hated.”Should we name the songs she hated? Day laughs, takes a breath, pulls out a hand to count them on her fingers, but her team jumps in. (Doing interviews with Gen Z artists, you learn that at some point, the team will jump in. I am told it wasn’t always this way.)Top and shorts ELLA OTTThey’re new, Day’s team. Some of them, anyway. Her manager, Sammy Seaver, and creative director, Ally Wei, are longstanding friends and collaborators, but there are a lot of new faces, new resources pouring into this project of Tiffany Day. Still, Day herself is actively involved in pretty much everything. She gave notes on the lighting cues for this tour, spent two weeks editing the concert visuals at her parents’ kitchen table in Kansas, and even drove around to different merchandise suppliers in Los Angeles and tried on hoodie samples to find the perfect batwing sleeve for her tour merch — the ultimate hoodie that hoodies. (Yes, Day says, she’s seen that viral TikTok). “It’s the most amount of money I’m making from a tour, however, it’s also the most amount of money we’re spending on a tour,” she tells me. “But Halo was really special, and I wanted to make sure the tour was just as special.” And after years doing everything on her own, she says, letting go even a little bit is “very scary.”To be fair, Day also thought that, given its initial reception, Halo would be her last project. Wei, 26, tells me that Day approached the album and the tour with a new clarity. “Tiff definitely had more of a vision for what she wanted the project to look like,” she says as we sit on the carpeted floor of a prop rental studio in Ridgewood. “It was a very Hail Mary type, ‘We're gonna go out with a bang.’” Wei and Day dreamed up their vision of “Tiffland” for the tour, a candy-colored Y2K world of Sanrio characters and early-internet tabs and angels. It was in the same colorway as Day’s previous bedroom pop projects, with the same bright hues and cartoon characters, but with a bit of Von Dutch edge. Wei and Day first became friends in 2021, after Wei DM’d Day on Instagram suggesting they shoot sometime. They quickly started working together. Halo, Wei says, is a little outside of her personal style, so this era has become more of a collaboration. “The partnership we have is so special that sometimes people ask me, ‘How do I find that?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know; it just kind of happened.’ I can’t imagine doing what I do for her for anyone else. The friendship element makes the project stronger.”It’s deeply ironic that the project that finally made Day feel like herself drew so many allegations of trend-hopping. It is true that this is a new sound for Day. It is true that electronic music is on the rise; data shared with me by Spotify shows that streaming numbers for electronic music were in decline until 2024, when they sharply reversed course, with US-based searches for genres like house growing 1,500% over the past six years. It’s a genre that, like many others, comes with a highly territorial fanbase and is skeptical of newcomers. Top and shorts FENDII ask Day how she feels about the discourse that clouded part of Halo’s release. In her open-book way, she nods. “I can understand that, as an avid person in your niche, it might feel like I’ve infiltrated,” she says. “But the reality is that I love your niche, I respect it, and I’m also very much a listener and a consumer. I’m not just gonna see something and be like, ‘Oh, that's trending, let me hop on that.’ The biggest misconception online is how people say, ‘Tiffany Day is a LARPer because she jumped into electronic music when it was trendy.’ It’s not their fault. It’s just that they probably don’t have enough time to do research on me.”Artists almost always face backlash for changing their sound. Even if most of the critics weren’t at Gramercy Theater in 2023, or following Day’s middle-school SoundCloud, where she was uploading anime edits. And the truth is, the fact that it took Day a while to get here is the whole point. “It almost feels like artists are spawning with everything planned out. And it took me six, seven, eight years to find who I was, or at least who I want to be,” she says. “The world literally saw how I grew up and changed and developed. The way I did it is honestly, not to toot my own horn, but I feel like it was brave.” She pauses for a second to double-check with herself, then throws up her hands. “Yeah! It was very brave of me to do that!”Hoodie and skirt MEMORY NYC, shoes FANCI CLUBAnyway, she’s past trying to prove anything to anyone else. This is about making something she’s proud of. About getting on Ableton again without wanting to throw up. “I’ve really just brushed it off my shoulder because it’s like, what are you gonna do? Change Betty03’s mind by replying back to her? That’s not happening,” she says.At Elsewhere, you can feel that return to self in the air. Day leaps around on stage, beaming and warning the boy sitting on another boy’s shoulders in the back to please be careful, please don’t make her liable for some bullshit. Everyone jumps when the lights start to flash, everyone goes pin drop-quiet during the tender moments. Nothing feels random, and no one is confused. Everyone’s into it, excited for this era of Tiffany Day. CreditsBy: Steffi CaoPhoto Assistant: Nikki BurnettPhotographed by: Olivia ParkerMakeup: Cass Lee Styled by: Blair CannonHair: Takayuki UmedaStyling Assistant : Chloe Shaar