Kiey, born Vưu Tuấn Kiệt, has spent two albums building an identity separate from his family’s business legacy as heirs to Biti’s, first with 2019’s Night To Myself and then 2022’s Sunday Sanctuary. “phan thiet,” out July 1st, is the lead single off his third record, METROMIRAGE, due in September, and it’s a departure in one small but telling way: where his past work has favored English titles, this one carries a simple Vietnamese name, taken directly from the coastal town where the song was written during a Lunar New Year road trip back to Ho Chi Minh City.
This is one of the few examples where I can define a song as a very Gen Z interpretation of old-school R&B, at least in the musical execution and the textures used in the sound design. The way the drums sound plays a huge part in this, sitting soft and slightly hazy rather than crisp, closer to the muted, lo-fi drum programming that’s become a signature of newer dream-pop and bedroom-R&B production than to anything a 90s or 2000s R&B record would have used. It’s a good example of how a genre’s emotional core- the warmth, the longing, the slow-burn intimacy- can survive a complete overhaul of its actual sonic palette. Nothing here sounds vintage, but the feeling underneath it does.
That feeling lines up with the song’s subject matter, which follows a young man drifting through memories of a dreamlike coastal trip with a woman he loves, before waking into the reality that she’s gone and only the memory remains. Kiey has said the goal was to translate the specific sensation of the ocean and sea breeze into sound, and the track’s soft, drifting textures do genuinely evoke that, even before knowing the backstory. The accompanying music video takes the loss theme somewhere darker and more literal, following a scientist attempting to rebuild his lost love as a humanoid robot, only for the revival to come back hollow and emotionless, but the song on its own stays in a gentler, more wistful register.
After nearly two months finishing the master, by Kiey’s account, his longest studio process yet, “phan thiet” plays like an artist taking his time to get a specific mood exactly right, and it shows.