Meet Cehryl, Hong Kong’s Low-Key Pop Gem

When Cehryl showed up to meet us wearing a Prince Purple Rain t-shirt, and with a biography of The Velvet Underground tucked under her arm, it was easy to suspect a persona was at play. How could we not report these tidy facts in this piece? But a few minutes in the singer-songwriter’s presence quickly dissolved any fears of pretension; Cehryl is as unguarded and genuine as her confessional, bedroom-pop songs appear.

The book definitely isn’t a prop: The Velvets, she gushes, are in her top three all-time bands, along with Radiohead and The Strokes. And she has a passion for thumbing up on music, so much so she shares a reading list after our chat. What she doesn’t love — unusually for a musician, you might think — is performing. That’s one reason that, despite her international profile, and despite having at least seven songs with a million or more streams, she’s not as well-known locally as these stats suggest.

“I don’t love playing shows,” admits the musician who was born in Hong Kong as Cheryl Chow. “Once I’m on stage and I’m playing the music, then I have a lot of fun. But I get really anxious and preoccupied leading up to it. So when people ask me to play a show, especially in Hong Kong, I weigh my mental health and, unless it’s something that I would be really proud of, I say no.”

Gigs we might gather she’s really proud of, then, include warming up for Ginger Root at Freespace earlier this year, and performing on the second stage at Clockenflap’s grand March 2023 comeback. She’s overcoming her nerves for the brand again to perform at this year’s official Clockenflap pre-party, curated by local indie tastemakers Un.Tomorrow. 

Between those shows, Cehryl made one other Hong Kong appearance this year, but anyone who attended was liable to be dumbfounded. Introduced by a primitive voice AI — think Radiohead’s song “Fitter, Happier” — the sultry artist walked solemnly onto the stage and, instead of picking up a guitar or even approaching a mic, stood behind a laptop to present an all-new set of trippy instrumental electronica, swooning between blissed-out ambient to chill house. It felt radiant and profound, and deeply liberating for the artist who, for once, “wasn’t nervous at all.” The venue? Terrible Baby, inside Eaton HK, the hip hotel where Cehryl works as a copywriter and digital media manager.

The gig was a one-off, for now at least, but the music is here to stay – her all-instrumental fourth album You Win Some, You Lose A Lot, quietly dropped early this month, alongside a self-effacing post announcing what Cehryl calls “51 minutes of vignettes from my life. Listen when you’re on your way somewhere, anywhere will do.” The music is clearly going places, but where did this left-turn come from?

Wordless music that says a lot

“All my life, I’ve been making essentially singer-songwriter music, so I think at some point I just got kind of bored of it,” says Cehryl, struggling to communicate the motivation behind this sudden stylistic side hustle. But if boredom was the raw material, then frustration was the lighter fuel — and heartbreak, we find later, the spark. “I just got kind of fed up with feeling like I didn’t have anything to say.”

So in the summer of 2024, instead of picking up her guitar, Cehryl set herself the challenge of composing a new beat every day, channelling electronic producers like Bogdan Raczynski, Definitely Vegan and, one suspects, Aphex Twin. “I think my motto at the time was just, stop trying to make perfect songs, stop trying to make a perfect album,” she remembers. “It just brought the fun back, and that’s what the project is all about — bringing the fun back to my music-making.”

At the time, she was reading Brian Eno’s meditations on creativity and commerce, realising as she noodled on her laptop how liberating it was to work with no end goal. But as the year drew to a close, and she surveyed these collected sonic anomalies, Cehryl realised she had amassed a bunch of pieces she was happy with.

Another reason that wordless music may have appealed at that moment? Because some things are too painful to put into words. Things like the end of a four-year relationship. “I think everything that I make musically is always in sync with my life — I don’t think you could ever detach those two things,” she says. But she couldn’t bring herself to make “a breakup record.” Instead, one senses catharsis in mournful vignettes titled “I Missed You Until I Didn’t” and closer “Some Things Are Very Precious After All.”

There wasn’t just a romantic split. The March 2025 release of Willow Tree (More! There’s More) also marked the end of Cehryl’s six-year record contract. She thinks her previous record label, though supportive, would have been “confused” by her new work. “So definitely when it ended, I just felt like some sort of return to play.”

Becoming Cehryl

There’s a joke about graduates of Berklee College of Music which goes something like, how do you know someone studied at Berklee? Because they will find a way to drop it into the conversation seconds after you’re introduced. 

Cehryl’s eyes roll back in her head when we ask her to recount why she left Hong Kong, to enrol in an as-yet-unspecified prestigious music school. “I don’t want to name drop,” she confesses. “But everyone who goes to that school goes to LA after graduating.” 

And so she did. It was a long way from her roots in Lok Fu, the Kowloon neighbourhood where she studied classical piano, gravitating towards the emotional landscapes and rich harmonies of Chopin and Debussy. She began writing music after hearing Avril Lavigne and inheriting a guitar from her older brother; her first song was about a cow. 

“Those early songs were so horrible,” she says. “But I definitely knew that I had a fixation that my friends, who also equally loved Avril Lavigne, didn’t. I have always had an ear for a good melody and I have good relative pitch, so it’s easy for me to play a song right after I listen to something — and that is what makes writing music so fun, because you can copy so quickly.” 

But Cehryl’s secret weapon may be her voice. Paul MacLean, drummer with post-punk breakouts 南洋派對 N.Y.P.D. and the founder of Hong Kong’s Sunset Studio, calls Cehryl a “human harmoniser” after recording her guest vocals for a track by local indie group Almond Milk. “She layered about a dozen takes of a [vocal] line in rapid fire. She then asked to listen to all of them together and, after hearing all of the combined tracks only once, asked me to remove just three — without even revisiting the individual takes. What was left was one of the most perfect harmonies that I’ve ever recorded. How she remembered which of her takes were slightly off, I’ll never know.”

Despite her evident natural talent, when it became time to choose a career, Cehryl’s parents were discouraging. “They were just looking out for me, worried that streaming was going to pay US$0.0035,” she sighs. “So they were right, actually.” 

But they relented in the end. After enrolling in a music production and engineering degree at you-know-which prestigious US music school in 2014, Cehryl began self releasing electro-folk singer-songwriter music that quickly picked up traction. With a picture of her messy Boston bedroom as its cover, the jazzy, low-key debut album Delusions (2016) already sounds like the work of a mature pop pro, and yielded two of her biggest hits, “Sway” and “Knock on Wood.” 

The buzz intensified after she moved to Los Angeles in 2017 and fell in with a group of likeminded musicians who crafted an indie scene in their own image: Boylife, Zack Villere and Mulherin — all successful indie musicians today. “I feel like I was part of a scene that the industry there paid attention to at the time,” she says without a trace of hubris. This attention included invites to open for acts like Dijon, Still Woozy, Ravyn Lanae and Raveena. “I was getting consistent offers to play shows — and that’s just what happens, I think, when you live in LA for long enough.”

It might be no coincidence that Cehryl’s biggest hit, slow-burning ballad “Dead Knot” — sitting pretty with seven million Spotify streams — dropped the year she left the US. “When I moved back to Hong Kong in 2019, I felt like it was all over, I just kind of quit the scene, that’s how people in the music industry saw it,” she says. “So I’m grateful that people are still listening to what I have to make [today]. Although the audience probably got smaller. It definitely has not grown as exponentially as it did when I was in LA.”

That career-slowing move wasn’t through choice. As Cehryl tells it, her artist visa was revoked thanks to a bitter ex-manager, leaving her “two or three days” to flee the country: a heartbreaking retreat home to a city she probably needed to reconnect with.

“You know, I’m so glad that happened, because I think it was important to come back to Hong Kong at that time,” she says, referring to the protests of 2019. “I’m glad that I feel attached to [what happened], and that it’s not just some story that I read through The Guardian or whatever.” Despite later obtaining a new artist visa for the US, when the pandemic hit, she decided to stay in Hong Kong for good.

A global sound, made in Hong Kong

While Cehryl’s best-known music feels truly globalised — polished neo-soul-influenced pop that could have been born anywhere in the Western world — You Win Some, You Lose A Lot is a self-confessed “love letter” to her home city. It screams from in-joke track titles like “Tai Hang Fire Dragon Dance Type Beat,” “Cross-Harbour Tunnel Music,” “Meet Me at the MTR Platform,” “The Kennedy Town Sunset is a Red Dot and I Think I Love Him” and “List of Hong Kong New Wave Movies to Watch” — references destined to be lost on Cehryl’s international audience. But that’s fine by her. 

“I just wanted my music to reflect my real life, instead of abstracting it to some sort of vague Western audience,” she explains. “I think when you want to be heard in 2025, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re playing specifically to Los Angeles or the music industry. When I lived in America, I was forgetting a big part of who I was.”

Coming back home, especially in 2019, gave her a “new pride” for being from Hong Kong. Since then, “I like taking every opportunity to put Hong Kong on the map,” she says. “If anybody outside of Hong Kong is gonna listen to this album, I would like for them to be like, ‘Oh, what is that?’ and Google it. I just liked owning that.”

You Win Some, You Lose A Lot is out now. Cehryl performs at the Pre-Clockenflap Party on 4 December 2025.