Tiger La Flor
Tiger La Flor gets easily restless. The Japanese-Korean-American indie pop artist has lived in more cities than she can recount in order — Seattle, Barcelona, Chicago, New York, Medellín, London, Los Angeles, Paris — inhabiting a different character in each one. “To make good art, you have to live a life that feels artistic,” she says. What stays constant across it all is what she’s trying to capture: a certain nostalgia for the timeless beauty in the ephemeral. She finds it in old films. Young love. And her first true love: rock & roll. With her honeyed voice and richly visual writing style, La Flor translates these ideas into lush songs that feel like discovered time capsules — filmic technicolor memories covered in a thin layer of golden dust. “The feeling of when life suddenly seems cinematic,” she adds. “That kind of stuff is what inspires me most.” On HOLLYWOODLAND, her debut EP for Arista Records, she slides into her most realized role yet: a glamorous variety-show starlet singing her way through romance and unraveling. HOLLYWOODLAND was the answer to a question La Flor had upon moving back to L.A. from Paris: What did she find romantic about the city? Certainly not being stuck in today’s traffic. “But when I thought about it through the lens of, ‘What if I was living in L.A. when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood took place?’ that was romantic to me,” La Flor says. To her, that looks like racing down Highway 1 in a top-down convertible at sundown, singing along to blaring ’60s and ’70s records in a pair of oversized vintage sunglasses and snakeskin cowboy boots. She dove deep, building chronological playlists from the era, researching the fashion trends, and shooting visuals on 16mm film. “I wanted the whole thing to just live in that world.” HOLLYWOODLAND drapes that world in La Flor’s “Laurel Canyon Western” sound, meshing the shimmering chords of ABBA with the rugged California cool of Chris Isaak — “like if David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino made country,” she quips. Recorded with live orchestral elements and drums cut to tape, it’s the most maximalist music she’s ever made. “KODACHROMATIC” sets the scene in a rose-tinted haze as La Flor sings of a relationship built to last. But atop the sun-baked guitars of the title track, “HOLLYWOODLAND,” she laments the difficulty of the L.A. dating scene. On “BAD COMPANY,” she’s the one waving the red flag — “I know I seem sweet but honey, I’m no honeybee” — while “IN COLD BLOOD” confronts a man she just can’t quit. The credits roll with “FOREVERMORE,” a delightfully unexpected mash-up of Motown’s Supremes and mariachi horns, when the relationship is over but no one wants to admit it. “I’d say the character on the record is someone who really idealizes the idea of love, but in practice messes things up for themselves,” La Flor says. She would know — though draped in fantasy, the story borrows heavily from its author’s reality. “The real Tiger La Flor is stuck in Redondo Beach in 2026. The setting isn’t so glamorous, but the themes carry over.” As a Seattle kid enamored with Kurt Cobain, La Flor fronted an all-girl grunge band with her sister and cousin before moving to New York for college, but music pulled her back. She moved to L.A. around 2020 and began releasing sunny but lovelorn singles. Her first EP, see me in hell (2024), was a four-year battle to release, a period she calls “one of the darkest times” of her life: written in a tiny studio apartment in East Hollywood, La Flor running out of savings, struggling to find anyone to work with. “People kept trying to take advantage of me,” she recalls. The independent release found its audience anyway, with viral breakouts like “super8” and “living in the 90s” earning her fans around the world. Then came Drugstore Cowgirl (2025), an Americana EP turned political statement. Despite growing up on Walla Walla county fairs and her dad’s Johnny Cash records, she’d never felt the genre was hers to claim. “I was annoyed there wasn't any Asian representation in country music at the time,” La Flor says, “so I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to make a country record.’” HOLLYWOODLAND is what happens when both threads converge: the Old Hollywood obsession of her first project married to the outlaw Western feel of her second. As it turns out, La Flor’s restlessness serves a greater purpose: fueling her own resilience and creative spark as she works to create what she wants to see in the world, whether that’s bygone beauty reimagined for a new generation of listeners, or a reflection of herself, as an Asian woman, in the art she grew up loving. “It’s a daily fight to be an artist and have what you actually care about come out,” she says. “So that’s what I'm most proud about — that I’m still in that fight.”
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