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MARIKA CHE
Bright Flame (s/r)
Add date: 4.14.2026
Release date: 4.8.2026
Marika Che is the project of Marika Justad, previously the frontwoman of the indie-rock band TANGERINE. The band garnered praise from NME, The Guardian, Flood, KEXP, Vice, Bust, Bitch, Stereogum, Rookie Mag, Billbaord, the Seattle Times, Buzzbands LA, and many more. The band’s music was heard on TV shows on FOX and MTV, and the band toured as main support for Jack Antonoff’s Bleachers “Gone Now” tour. They have been featured on multiple Apple editorial playlists, and their song “Feel This Way” has millions of streams and counting on Spotify. Now after a brief period of soul-searching, Justad is back as Marika Che (Che is her middle name, taken from her grandmother’s best friend in Korea) with a debut LP out April 8th 2026 titled “Bright Flame”.
Ahead of Bright Flame, Che released “Hot Moon” in December of 2025, a dreamy, languid ode to Los Angeles and aimlessness, followed by “Saint Charles Avenue”, a lush, melodic, slow-dance of a track that blends a singer-songwriter’s sensibility with horn samples and plenty of harmonies. “Saint Charles Avenue” is accompanied by a video directed by Che’s sister, the artist and former TANGERINE drummer Miró Myung Justad. Miró is Marika’s constant visual collaborator and shot all the press photos for “Bright Flame”.
Across 12 tender and searching tracks, Che invites us into a world both vast and granular- from dirty dishes to wide open skies. The album opens with “Bonfire of Tragedy”, a haunting, stripped-down song about grief which finds Che telling a friend: “you’ve had a hard time, I think you should try: the Bonfire of Tragedy.” Listen closely and you can hear Che reading passages from her late fathers prose poetry, blanketed in eerie layers of humming. “Edge Of the Storm” finds Che sitting uneasily with a new-found peace of mind, wondering when the storms of the past will return: “I know it’s all good these days. But rolling thunder’s never far away.”
Creativity, identity, and making peace with inner demons are all constant themes across Bright Flame. As a self-described “failed would-be child star”, Che dreams of the freedom that comes with failure in “Please Can I Fail”, a fuzzy, dancey, earworm that parses shame, hangover-anxiety, and burn-out. On the titular track “Bright Flame”, she speaks to her creativity as a guiding light, a literal flame: “it calls me by my name (that’s my bright flame). Won’t let me lose my way (that’s my bright flame). I chase it ‘cross the page (that’s my bright flame.)”
Another stand-out track is “Little Cures (Come Right On Time)” which quickly envelopes the listener in warm, expansive, guitars. Reflecting on the forces that make her who she is, Che sings: “they say that half-broke horses are never tame, but they’re never truly wild.” She contemplates the act of songwriting, and how it can be used to confront things that are otherwise too hard to look at. It’s “like calling down the rain,” she sings, “in my hand it looks so tame.”
Written after a period of intense soul searching, “Bright Flame” grapples with the Pandora's box of chasing your dreams; what follows is often a chaotic mixture of joy, danger, mystery, and beauty. Che invites us to hold this tension with her. Bright Flame is a spellbinding debut from an artist plumbing the depths (“If I'm diving down too deep, won’t you let me know?” she asks on “Coach Taylor”), but always alive to the beauty around her.
Photo Credit: Miró Myung Justad