After years of making music, Tiffany Day hit ‘Start Over’

When Tiffany Day was younger, her mother used to recite to her a Chinese expression roughly translating, “True gold will always shine.”

As the Wichita-bred artist, 26, releases her sophomore album “Halo,” a fervid new entry in the hyperpop lane, she is glistening bright. The singles off of her new album have already amassed millions of Spotify streams. Last year, she signed a record deal after her music took off on social media. And in the last month, she supercharged venues across the U.S. and Canada on Aries’ Glass Jaw World Tour, capping off her supporting run Wednesday at the Fonda Theatre in L.A., her current home base.

“God, I question, is this actually real?” Day sings about her recent good fortune in “Halo’s” hypnotic opening track, “Everything I’ve Ever Wanted.”

Yet the lyrics that follow betray the artist’s lingering closeness to a dull spell that preceded this golden era: “I’ve never been able to see myself as somebody more/ somebody like the other bodies on my screen I adore.”

For the majority of Day’s career, which began in her late teens, she drifted between the bedroom pop and R&B genres, occasionally grabbing at a more electronic sound — including through a DJ alter ego — but shying away from it on account of a deep-seated insecurity that followed her from Kansas to L.A.

As a “nerdy” Asian girl coming up in a majority-white school system, Day had the persistent thought: “I’ll never be a cool kid.”

“It weirdly translated into the artist world,” the singer-producer said in a recent interview at the Observatory in Santa Ana, where she would open Aries’ show a few hours later. While she spoke animatedly from a green room couch, Day’s bubblegum pink off-shoulder tee and baggy white pants repeatedly flounced out and then resettled in new shapes.

In place of the populars, Day said she began measuring herself against her favorite electronic artists, whose style of performance she idolized but felt she could never approximate. That feeling peaked at a 2024 electroclash concert, which showcased a sound that fuses ‘80s synth pop, ‘90s techno and the brashness of punk. Day attended the show shortly after the release of her debut album “Lover Tofu Fruit.”

“It was this weird shattering of inspiration, but I also felt sick to my stomach, because, how could I ever be as cool as these people?” Day said. By the time she set off to tour her album, the artist said, “I was already so checked out.”

Day packed all of the angst of that period into “American Girl,” the second single off of “Halo.”

“All up in my head/ I’m an American girl/ I know I don’t look like you yet/ Wanna be part of your world,” she sings in the glitch pop confessional, which has become one of her favorite songs to play live.

With “American Girl” and her previous single, “Pretty4U,” Day started to hone her signature sound. But she also lost some engagement from her more indie-leaning listeners.

“They weren’t being well-received because it wasn’t necessarily made for her previous fan base,” said Day’s manager, Sammy Seaver. Even before a less-than-successful promotional push for “American Girl” led Day to make a distress call to her manager, “we both knew the conversation was coming,” he said.

Seaver likes to tell people that when he first met Day, she was doing pop sessions, but all she listened to was the dubstep music she’d fallen in love with as a kid.

“It was very clear immediately that we were gonna be building something really fun together for a while,” the manager said. “We both kind of knew, you are going to chart a really cool path — we just need to figure out where that is.”

On the phone all those years later, Day told Seaver she couldn’t keep making music people didn’t like. She was convinced she’d “fallen off.”

“I told her that artists don’t fall off, they give up,” Seaver said. And as defeated as Day felt, he knew she didn’t truly want to quit.

The manager went on to recount a story about another artist he worked with, who had dedicated months to TikTok to solid success. Day committed to one month. If she made it through the full 30 days, she’d reward herself with a Dyson Airwrap.

“The craziest part is I never posted to gain respect or attention,” Day said, adding that she refused to employ any marketing gimmicks. Instead, she thought, “I’m making these cool edits, and I just want to share them because I’m proud of them.” Her attitude was inspired by the anime-editing days of her youth.

“Before I knew it, the month was over, I had gained like 50,000 TikTok followers and I signed a record deal,” she said.

Tiffany Day is signed with independent record label Broke Records.

(Brian Feinzimer / For The Times)

But equally important as those gains was the sense of agency the project gave Day, fueling the making of “Halo.” Whereas “Lover Tofu Fruit” wound up laden with session songs Day never liked in the first place, her new record is an intricate compendium she stands by from start to finish.

Tricked out with the signature features of hyperpop — heavy distortion, pitch-shifted vocals, blown-out production — yet retaining the diary-driven writing style that pervades Day’s discography, “Halo” synthesizes everything the artist always wanted her music to be. It’s also a testament to how production can be just as effective as lyric composition in curating an album’s emotional atmosphere; an ace songwriter might make you cry with a poetic turn of phrase, but Day does it with a pulsing synth.

While she hesitates to call it a rebrand, Day said her hard pivot in the hyperpop direction was nerve-racking at first. She feared being called a clone, or a try-hard who’d hopped on a trend.

“But I got over it pretty quick, because I’m in love with the songs I’ve been making,” she said, and that love “triumphs [over] all of my fears.”

For many of the tracks on “Halo,” Day would start off with a producing collaborator and finish on her own: “They’ll usually send me home with the Ableton file, then I get to freak it.”

Such was the case for “Start Over,” a dizzying homage to the rave music Day considers its own art form. The track starts relatively tame with a melodic synth sequence, and then sounds crash in one after another until it’s full electromania. Fittingly, Day made it in the witching hours after last year’s Niteharts Festival. She’d chugged a Red Bull, which she never did, and couldn’t fall asleep.

“So I sat up in the hotel bed with these s— $2 Target headphones and produced out the whole song,” Day said. “It was like that feeling of being a kid and staying up until 7 a.m. playing a video game.”

That night she spent producing “Start Over” was immensely cathartic, just like writing it had been. Composed as Day’s star rose in real time, the song was a receptacle for all of her conflicting feelings about her newfound attention.

“So I did it/ now I’m starting again/ at first no one gave a f—/ but now you’re hitting me up/ I guess I’m doing something right,” Day sings over a thrumming backing track early in the song. A few bars later, she professes, “Could give a f— ‘bout what the number says/ at least that’s what I tell my[self].”

The week “Start Over” was scheduled to drop, Day posted a quick pair of TikTok edits teasing the release.

Before she knew it, the first edit had blown up and people were begging for the song. When it came out, “Start Over” broke Day’s personal record for release day streams with 100,000 across Spotify, Apple and YouTube. It’s impossible to predict which songs will gain traction, Day said, but she was very proud that one did.

That pride radiated off of her in late March as she bounced around the Observatory stage like a lottery ball in an air blower. Her energy was contagious, seizing entire parties across the venue.

At times, Day said the inherent impermanence of the spotlight gets to her.

“I feel like I’m on shrooms when I think about this,” she said, “the whole idea of hype and how much time is left in this.”

But after feeling forgotten for most of her career, and forging ahead in spite of it, the idea of going back doesn’t scare her so much.

“Or maybe that’s what I tell myself,” she grinned.