IN CONVERSATION WITH NO NA

interview by JANA LETONJA

photography by VIRIDIANA

Indonesia’s first global girl group, no na, have arrived with their debut album island girl. Made up of Baila, Christy, Esther and Shaz, the 88rising group have quickly built a huge international audience with tracks including work and rollerblade, pairing contemporary pop and R&B with sounds, references and visuals rooted in Indonesian culture. Across 15 tracks, island girl introduces what no na call “Island Pop,” a world where 80s R&B, new jack swing, synth-funk and dangdut meet gamelan, ceng-ceng and even the sound of an Indonesian minibus horn. 

Congratulations on island girl. How does it feel to finally have your debut album out in the world? 
Christy: It feels surreal. We’ve been living with these songs for a very long time, so to finally have people hear the whole album and understand the world we’ve been building is really special. island girl is the first proper introduction to who no na is, not just musically, but our personalities, where we come from, and all the different sides of us.

Take us back to the beginning. How did the four of you first meet, and when did it start to feel like you were genuinely becoming a group rather than four individual performers? 
Shaz: At the beginning, we were definitely four individuals learning how to move as one. We spent so much time together through rehearsals, recording, traveling and hanging out that eventually the chemistry became natural. On top of that, we all live together now, so that definitely brought us a lot closer.

Your name plays on the Indonesian word nona, meaning “miss” or “young lady.” What does the name mean to you now that you’ve grown into the identity of the group? 
Baila: There’s something feminine and familiar about the word nona, especially in Indonesia, but breaking it into no na also gave it’s own identity. To us now, it represents four Indonesian girls who can be feminine, playful, confident, messy, loud and ambitious all at the same time.

Indonesian sounds are woven into the album in really specific ways, from ceng-ceng on work and gamelan on rollerblade to a minibus horn on honk! How did you decide which pieces of everyday Indonesian life belonged in these songs? 
Esther: We never wanted Indonesian elements to feel like something we added to say, “This is Indonesian.” A lot of the references came from sounds and experiences that are genuinely familiar to us. Sometimes it was an instrument like gamelan or ceng-ceng, and sometimes it was something as ordinary as a bus horn you might hear on the street. We love the idea that these very specific sounds from home can exist naturally inside pop, R&B or dance music.

Was there an Indonesian sound, instrument, phrase or cultural reference that you were especially excited to introduce to listeners who might never have encountered it before? 
Christy: Gamelan was definitely one of them. It has such a distinctive sound and carries so much history, so hearing it live inside something like rollerblade, which is otherwise such a contemporary pop record, was really exciting.

Rollerblade and work have travelled incredibly far online. What has been the strangest or most surreal moment of realizing that people thousands of miles from Indonesia know your songs? 
Shaz: Seeing people who don’t speak Indonesian singing our lyrics or doing our choreography will probably never feel normal. Sometimes we’ll open our phones and see someone on the other side of the world using one of our songs, and there’s this moment of, “Wait, how did it even get there?” 

What does the phrase “island girl” mean to each of you personally? Is she a character, an attitude, a version of yourselves, or all of those things? 
Baila: An island girl can be very confident one day and completely in her feelings the next. She can be glamorous and also be riding around on a motorbike. She can love where she comes from, while being curious about the rest of the world. For us, it isn’t really one specific aesthetic or type of girl. It’s a mindset, being proud of home without feeling limited by it. There are four of us, and we’re all very different versions of an island girl.

Your visual identity feels almost as considered as the music. How involved are the four of you in developing the fashion, choreography, imagery and wider world around no na? 
Shaz: We are grateful that throughout our time, 88 made all of our processes very collaborative with our writers and choreographer. We work with an amazing creative team, and there’s always a conversation between us. The goal is for everything — the clothes, movement, photography, videos — to feel like it belongs in the same universe as the music without making all four of us look or behave exactly the same.

Being described as the first global girl group from Indonesia comes with a lot of excitement, but presumably some pressure too. Do you feel a responsibility to represent Indonesia, and how do you balance that with simply being yourselves? 

Christy: There is definitely a sense of responsibility, because for some people, we might be one of their first introductions to Indonesian pop culture. The best thing we can do is be genuine about our own experience and let our language, humour, references, and culture naturally come through in who we are. And hopefully it doesn’t stop with us. There are so many incredible Indonesian creatives whose work deserves to be seen and heard around the world, and we hope our journey can inspire the next generation to believe that theirs can travel too. 

You’ve gone from releasing your first single to building an enormous global audience very quickly. How has that changed your lives and your relationships with one another? 
Baila: Everything has moved really fast. We travel more, there are constantly new people around us, and suddenly things that used to feel very private can become public. In a strange way, that has made the four of us even closer because we’re the only people experiencing all of it from the same perspective. There are obviously stressful moments, and being together this much means we’ve seen every possible side of one another, but we’ve also learned when someone needs encouragement, when they need space, and when they just need someone to make them laugh.

Girl groups often develop their own internal language and dynamics. Who is the organiser, who makes everyone laugh, who takes forever to get ready, and who is most likely to cause chaos? 
Esther: Baila and I are definitely the organisers. We’re usually the ones helping get everyone together and making sure we’re all on the same page.

Christy is the jokester of the group, but most of the time she’s not even trying to be funny. She’s just naturally hilarious and somehow always manages to brighten the mood in the room. And Shaz is our adek, which means younger sibling in Bahasa Indonesia, so naturally, she’s the one most likely to cause chaos. She has that younger-sibling energy, a little clumsy, a little unpredictable, and always keeping the rest of us entertained.