The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
The thing about SAILORR is that she’s Florida through and through. The 26-year-old Vietnamese-American singer from Jacksonville curves her words slightly when she speaks, especially prominent when she peppers in words like “hella” and “vibe.” It shapes the way she croons “To whatever bitch you got in Bushwiiick” on “Pookie’s Requiem,” the November 2024 song that introduced the world to her lovelorn R&B. The single that followed, “Cut Up,” takes its title from slang used widely across Florida and the South (to cut up: to start acting up over something). SAILORR is built different, and her music’s approach to love — finding it, losing it, and crashing out — reflects her distinct structure.
“Growing up [in Jacksonville], I feel like I didn't really adhere to any social norms or whatever boundaries and binaries people tried to put on me,” SAILORR says on a recent March morning. We’re talking over a video call and she’s still in bed, dressed in a slouchy black tee and out of her usual uniform of pink, frills, and bows. “The South, it’s very traditional and almost conservative there. When you find your little pockets in communities that you do resonate with, it's a very beautiful thing.”
She’s speaking to me from her new home in Los Angeles, where she moved in January as her life began to change. In the five months since “Pookie’s Requiem” became ubiquitous on TikTok, SAILORR skyrocketed from being a virtual unknown to an artist covered by Halle Bailey, posted by Justin Bieber, and remixed by Summer Walker. In March, news broke that her label BuVision, run by Akon’s brother Abou Thiam, would be merging with Atlantic Music Group, sending her further into the big leagues. All the attention has brought countless new eyes, and she’s feeling it.
"It's very jarring to realize that this many people are watching me,” she says early in our interview, initially reluctant to turn on her camera but concedes when I reassure her the footage won’t be used. “The only thing that really keeps me grounded is the music. As long as I have music, I'm straight.”
“It’s very jarring to realize that this many people are watching me. The only thing that really keeps me grounded is the music.”
Growing up in a large, traditional Vietnamese family to blue collar immigrant parents, SAILORR found refuge watching music videos on MTV during family functions and stealing her sister’s iPod to put herself on: “André 3000 and Erykah Badu,” she lists. “I have a very deep love for neo soul.” An avid journaler and performer, she took up the musical theater track at a local performing arts high school. But after realizing she didn’t enjoy “telling other people's narratives,” she pivoted to teaching herself how to make her own beats: first on a SP-404 digital sampler, then D.A.Ws like Fruity Loops and Ableton. From there, she integrated herself in a community of music-making friends.
Before she was SAILORR, she released music under the name Sailor Goon, a moniker inspired by the Japanese anime Sailor Moon that nodded to the “soft but also hard” style of her personality. “I have gone through a lot of shit in my life and had to grow up to be a super, hyper-independent person,” she says, declining to go into detail. Her early sample-driven songs showcased her fluid runs and deep, resonant voice (most, if not all, of these songs have since been taken down). But it was in “Pookie’s Requiem,” her first major release under the abbreviated name SAILORR, where she found her pocket.
A thumping kiss-off to an ex and his new piece with idiosyncratic lyrics like “Bet you’ll get a dog and name it after me, hey Pookie,” it immediately pricked the ears of the messy, confessional-core crowd. Her On The Block video announced the arrival of a new R&B powerhouse, her persona fully formed with black grillz and a coquette-core uniform of braids, bows, and heavily lined lips. But it also courted a number of detractors claiming cultural appropriation around her black grillz (she later attributed the jewelry as her homage to Southeast Asian beauty practices in interviews) and her use of AAVE.
She addresses the criticism lucidly, an indication that it’s been on her mind. “I don't blame people for making assumptions about me. I think people are going to contextualize me with whatever they know or have experienced themselves, especially in the space that I'm in, which is R&B [and] hip-hop music,” she says. “I respect the space that I'm in and I pay homage to the people that came before me because at the end of the day, without all these amazing artists, music would not exist.”
She continues, “There are people out here being disrespectful, there are people out here just ignorant to a lot of things. I don't consider myself that person. I think I'm very well read, and I'm aware of everything.” She pauses. “But at the end of the day, I don't want to piss people off.”
“I respect the space that I’m in and I pay homage to the people that came before me.”
The narratives in SAILORR’s music follow in the lineage of artists like SZA and Summer Walker but dragged through the swamp muck of Florida. Busted 808s ravage the delicate allure of her latest single “Down Bad,” another track about shameless wallowing produced by Zach Ezzy and Adam Krevlin — two longtime friends whom SAILORR describes as the “Timbaland to [my] Missy” — that pries at complex femininity (“It's bad bitch energy, but also softness”). The song precedes her debut album, expected to drop this spring and further flesh out the SAILORR universe. The vibe is “sexy as hell,” she teases, and feels “like a hot ass summer in Florida with your homegirls, smoking cigarettes on the side of the road.”
SAILORR doesn’t want her art to be tied to her ethnicity (“There's a lot more to me than just being Vietnamese,” she says matter-of-factly). Everything she makes, she insists, is to “honor women” — complicated women, messy women, toxic women, women who double text and spiral. It’s a principle that stems from the very beginning of the SAILORR project: she was scrolling one day when a meme of a roach with a pink bow on its head stopped her thumb in its tracks. “I was like, that’s me!”
Hair by Julz Elena. Makeup by Arielle Park.
