“I’ve exited this phase of my life, but for three years, I was obsessed with barbecue sauce,” explains Claire Chicha from her Los Angeles home. “For three years, I had barbecue sauce as much as I could.” Throughout our conversation, Chicha is plainly honest, balancing occasional self-deprecation with newfound confidence she’s activated in her creative life. For more than five years, Chicha has been releasing indie pop songs under the name spill tab, pushing against the perennial expectation of “chill” music in search of something sincere and unpredictable. Across three EPs, a handful of loosies, and several collabs, she’s broadened her arsenal beyond her humble beginnings of assembling the first spill tab songs at home with a friend. Her debut album ANGIE weaponizes all of these tools to reveal that spill tab is Chicha’s fully formed vessel for pop now, a persona that pushes boundaries. ANGIE is conceptually and sonically more intriguing than anything Chicha has put out thus far, and it’s taken a lot of hard work to get here.
Chicha reveals that she was an annoying child before the days of spill tab. “I was really stubborn. I remember my parents put me in karate when I was 7. I would lay down on the mat screaming and crying if I didn’t want to do karate that day.” She grew up in a talented household, including her classical pianist mother and jazz composer father; her childhood contained a steady musical diet of the obscure and the grand, with frequent trips to Walt Disney Concert Hall for classical showcases, where Chicha admits she often fell asleep. Museum visits, especially to the Getty, tended to her budding curiosity for the arts. Her mother even encouraged her to pursue piano, harp, and violin at various points, but young Chicha was prone to quitting, and each suggested venture only escalated her chronic urge to rebel.
Chicha grew up in a multicultural household—her mother is Korean, her father French Algerian—in Los Angeles, and she spent her adolescence changing continents, living with extended family while forming her personal identity. In middle school, her family moved to Thailand to live with her mother’s relatives. Enmeshed in the musical and visual cultures of southeast Asia, Chicha embraced her love for punk and alternative rock. “I was a huge fan of Coldplay, Paramore, Escape the Fate, and Green Day,” she recalls. “I decided I wanted to learn every Paramore song on the guitar I could, so I did.” The guitar was one thing she didn’t quit, much to the relief of her parents. In her prior instrumentalism, she often required a more formal education, but with the guitar, Chicha could research guitar tabs online and learn how to emulate her favorites from there. “I was able to advance in that instrument a lot faster because I could teach myself finger picking. I felt independent and autonomous,” she continues. The accessibility and portability of the guitar allowed her a degree of freedom that she didn’t have with the violin or the harp, and she didn’t have to listen to adults telling her what to do. That doesn’t mean she didn’t embrace some opportunities for instruction—after Thailand, Chicha’s family lived in Paris for a time, where she became involved with a government-supported youth conservatory and took bossa nova guitar lessons.
Chicha returned to Los Angeles in her late teens before studying music business at NYU, soaking in different perspectives on the music industry with a group of similarly interested peers. “They say you make money on your advance. The reality is you kind of have to stretch that out for two to four years or so,” Chicha recalls. What was most formative in her music business education was the meticulousness she developed early in her career. When spill tab was just a bedroom project with some help from her friend/producer David Marinelli, Chicha was her own manager and publicist. She’d spend weeks on SubmitHub and cold-emailing any publication she could find. “I had an Excel sheet for tracking who got back to me,” she remembers, shouting out a friend who worked for a distributor that specialized in getting independent artists in front of playlist curators. “That’s how we ended up getting a spot on [the Spotify playlist] Lorem with ‘Calvaire.’”
It was somewhat ideal timing: After graduating and selling merchandise on a friend’s tour, Chicha was looking for tour management roles. The French-language bop “Calvaire” dropped in March of 2020, just days before COVID-19 precautions halted concerts and dried up all the work. While her profile as a musician grew on nascent alternative playlists, she worked promotional jobs for dispensaries around southern California, just trying to endure the pandemic. Early singles like “Calvaire” and “Cotton Candy” made their way to audiences, often through Lorem, which debuted around the time that spill tab’s first single, “Decompose,” hit the airwaves. Spotify had made a name for itself with its massive library and genre playlists, but Lorem proved a good bet: Younger audiences wanted genre-agnostic mixes that featured the alternative talents they were coalescing around, like girl in red or Omar Apollo, and they were hungry for new discoveries.
Today, those curatorial playlists are the platform’s signature products: POLLEN and IRL Angel mine the pop and alternative extremes for new favorites; Cph+ capitalizes on the excitement around Copenhagen’s alt-pop scene to highlight artists in and out of Denmark trafficking in spiritually similar sounds. Chicha and several of her friends, like bennytheghost, mazie, and judith, all gained streaming traction via Lorem: “It felt like our little family was getting reflected back on this DSP platform, which was cute in the pandemic.” Early spill tab music fit in pretty well with the low-key, soulful bedroom pop of the late-2010s/early-2020s á la Clairo or Wallice, but as is common in this scene, spill tab’s music is a distinctive genre amalgamation. Her music from then and now possesses both the slacker sub-seriousness of one of her idols, Alex G, but she bolsters it with the emotional weight and stylistic rambunctiousness of her other hero, Bon Iver, whose album 22, A Million remains a cornerstone for her.
Chicha is not the type to rest on her laurels. As much as she looks back on those early high points with pride, she’s spent the years since building her own capacities as a producer. Her artistic practice aligns with her penchant for self-reliance. “There’s a very small amount of input that it takes to make me feel like a song isn’t really my song anymore,” she explains, regarding her disinterest in co-writers. She signed on with Arista Records and released her earliest work on a brilliantly understated EP, Oatmilk, before returning to the studio. She then made the collab-heavy Bonnie EP in 2021 and the bold-yet-sleek Klepto EP in 2023. Over that time, Chicha experimented with new production avenues, putting her voice through different prisms of distortion on the abrasive “PISTOLWHIP,” or letting her gentle voice compete against syncopated glitches on “Sunburn.” “It’s like when a kid learns a new cuss word for the first time. I would suddenly want everything distorted or I’d want all of my vocals to have formant shifting,” she explains, admitting that she’s nowhere near done learning what she wants to learn as a producer, but that the album-making process has taught her to use her favorite tools with intention. She’s kept a small circle of producers, including Marinelli, whom she still trades ideas with.
Her first exposures to touring were behind the scenes, slinging merch and crunching count numbers, but in the years since, she’s done everything from DIY shows to opening for superstars. Her initiation as a solo artist coincided with a long-term pause on touring, but once it was safe, Chicha hit the ground running. Early on, Chicha criss-crossed the US in a van with her friends and fellow Lorem stars Gus Dapperton and JAWNY, debuting live iterations of her music to young, modest audiences. She spent time opening for Wallows, playing for sold-out crowds in the high four figures, before joining the West Coast leg of Sabrina Carpenter’s 2023 tour and opening gigs full of young and curious fans. “There were a few times where people would say, ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever seen play live!’ because they saw me open.”