Orion Sun

Orion Sun is in love with the process. “I feel like my most shallow and my deepest self when I’m in the recording process, because I’m digging deep but to everyone in my life, that’s all I can talk about,” she laughs.” And so after two years in creation mode, it’s no surprise that she’s still coming to terms with what life looks like outside of the studio. “Not being there feels weird, I feel weird! But I went to a flea market today for the first time,” she says proudly.

The child of two artists, raised in South Jersey, now based in Los Angeles, Orion has cultivated a huge cult following with her singular lane of intoxicatingly intimate alt R&B and warmly analogue aesthetics. Featured on the opener of Fred Again’s latest album USB, having supported Daniel Caesar on his 2023 tour, been sampled by Bryson Tiller and amassing almost 5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, all as an independent artist, the 28-year-old is primed and giddy to release her self-titled album Orion. The name alone signifies the gradual build up to this moment, she explains. “[Orion] is a hunter and that mentality, you know, you need patience when you’re out there. You could be there for days. Waiting for that perfect sound, that perfect feeling.”

Following three critically acclaimed projects of her own in A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams (2017), Hold Space For Me (2020) and Getaway (2022), though Orion is not her debut, in many ways it feels like it. Sparked by a big, deep heartbreak (unlike the times she thought she was heartbroken before), Orion embarks on a journey of self-discovery, grief and growth. “It [was] time to get to know me again as an adult,” she says. And the result is a meditation on love in all of its raw, tangled beauty and ugliness too. “I just wanted to be as bare bones emotionally as I possibly could because I was curious about what was on the other side of that.” Citing the poem at the end of first single ‘Already Gone’ as a soul-baring moment she had to stand “ten toes down” on, even when it felt revealing. On the track, she laments ‘all my scars bleed, I feel weak and ugly.’ “I don’t feel that way now but the beautiful part of all this is that it’s all fleeting, even the good stuff. It’s kind of magic when you are able to push past those emotions and capture them because I listen back now and I’m like ‘we made it!’”