Artist Profile: ladybug
Every time ladybug, the Massachusetts-based dream-pop and shoegaze-tinged indie artist takes up her improvisational songwriting process, it is the years of musical intrigue and the yearning for creative expression that truly flows forth through her words— a flood of suppressed emotions and untapped creative maturation that is abundantly evident not only in each of her hypnotic and varied singles but also across her collaborations, including the 2025 EP “live from the smoke room”.
As a child of Chinese immigrants growing up in a suburb outside of Los Angeles, not many of ladybug’s childhood memories are defined by or even necessarily associated with music. Her parents didn’t play music around the house, and often her only form of musical expression throughout her childhood came through her constant desire to sing and create melodies. Her parents did, however, have an interest in theater, and ladybug has fond memories of watching The Sound of Music with her parents, feeling herself gravitate towards each and everyone of the film’s iconic musical scenes.
“Anything that was singing was something magical to hear… Anything that Chinese immigrant parents can show their kids, something you could hear, I was always really locked in. Like, ‘Yes, I need to be paying attention to this part.’”
As she grew older, her school choir provided her with an outlet for her growing obsession, and her introduction to artists like Frank Ocean and Beabadoobee led her even deeper down the musical rabbit hole that she had entered when she became a teenager.
From there, her tastes expanded even further, delving into some of the grungier and darker sounds that these genres had to provide.
Although she was avidly training her voice, her first encounters with songwriting didn’t come until she hired a vocal coach to train for her audition for Berklee College of Music. Part of the audition requires improvisation, and her coach suggested she practice writing her own songs to prepare. She auditioned for Berklee with a selection of songs she had written in the three months prior to her examination. She was ultimately accepted, and once there, she became ingrained in a community of fellow artists and collaborators for the first time in her life.
While she ultimately moved on from the school, that experience was formative. From the new music and new creative avenues she was exposed to, she learned the exact sort of balance she wanted to strike with her sound— a brand of pop positioned between the dreamy, acoustic qualities that she had loved through her adolescence and the crunchier, more alternative sounds that appealed to her peers at Berklee.
“Pop music is the biggest genre in the world right now because the practicality of it makes it really easy to get stuck in your head. It's catchy; it's easy to listen to…. So I think, taking that approach into instrumental sounds,… I just like dark, crunchy, grungy sounds, harmonics on distortion pedals, I love stuff like that— stuff that kind of just itches your brain.”
From her very first released singles, including the distortion-filled “2010”, ladybug’s sonic intentions are crystal clear.
As time has gone on, this refinement of her sound has also come with a refinement of her improvisational songwriting approach. She has such a natural intuition for crafting melodies, and altering those melodies to create a dissonance that juxtaposes with her pop-influenced background, that her process for creating lyrics often comes just through playing her guitar or hearing the instrumental and seeing what words spew forth from her creative consciousness.
“I'm versatile. But I think songwriting is kind of just a coping mechanism. Whatever is scrunched up in my brain, I improvise my lyrics, I just say whatever. And if I like it, I just write it down… So it really is just however my brain wants to process what it's thinking musically… I would say that it's pretty authentic.”
As she has continued to work with her collaborators, however, that creative approach has had to forge itself in new territories and circumstances. “live from the smoke room” was recorded in tandem with Dvorin, the solo project of Jimrat guitarist Samuel Dvorin. The two first met at ladybug’s first live performance under her current project, and they immediately hit it off creatively. The two recorded the EP in collaboration in Austin, with Dvorin providing most of the progressions and instrumentals and ladybug contributing heavily to the vocals of the project. She credits the creative friction, and the productive working environment, for forcing her to re-imagine, in some ways, her approach to the songwriting process.
“Sam has a really different way of making music than me, actually. So we struggled with that for a second. We wouldn't agree on certain things… We would [go] back and forth. But it was tough love, you know, because we were making something great. And we both knew it.”
Across six transcendent tracks “live from the smoke room” shows a wide range of what ladybug is capable of as a vocalist and a musical personality, with a series of relatively minimalist instrumentals allowing her to reach a range and emotional depth that leaves a deep impression on the listener. Dvorin and ladybug have recorded an acoustic version of “live from the smoke room”, which will be released sometime in the next couple of months.
But as ladybug continues to carve out her sonic niche, it is still that artistic flexibility, and that deep knowledge of the sound she wants to forge, that will propel her onwards.
