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MARIKA CHE

Bright Flame
(s/r)
Add date: 4.14.2026
Release date: 4.8.2026




LA-based singer-songwriter Marika Che is announcing her debut LP, Bright Flame, out April 8th, 2026. “Saint Charles Avenue,” the first official single from Bright Flame, follows the folk-y ode to LA, titled “Hot Moon”, which she released this past December as a musical first-look. “Saint Charles Avenue” starts small, growing from a single guitar and Che’s velvety voice into a lush slow-dance, laced through with sax and horns. Accompanied by a video directed by Che’s sister, the artist Miró Myung Justad, the two have been visual collaborators since they were both members of the band TANGERINE, and two more videos will follow “Saint Charles Avenue” all directed by Justad.

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 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.”

Marika Che was the frontwoman for the indie-rock band TANGERINE and over the course of their albums the band garnered praise from NME, The Guardian, FLOOD, KEXP, VICE, Bust, Bitch, Stereogum, Rookie Mag, Billboard, 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.

Originally from Seattle, Che has called Los Angeles home for the past seven years and the sprawling, lonely city is a constant presence through-out Bright Flame. Che’s mother was born in Seoul during the Korean War and Che’s father, born in the Great Plains, was the eldest son of a Methodist Preacher. With the perspective of a sometime-outsider, Che is often drawn to deeply “American” themes.

“When we were tracking ‘Coach Taylor’, (which is named after the character from Friday Night Lights), I told the musicians to imagine they were ‘driving around in a forerunner with the windows down, crying’. They probably thought I was so corny for that, but what I wanted was to create a state of deep emotional earnestness… I think Asian-Americans can have this complicated, magnetic pull toward Americana. I’m thinking of Chloe Zhao’s “Nomadland”, Mitski and Olivia Rodrigo singing about what it means to be ‘your best American girl, or an ‘all-american bitch,’ or the photographs of Tseng Kwong Chi and Emanuel Hahn that depict Asians in the American west. We might feel deeply American, yet our status as perpetual outsiders gives us this added perspective.”

In the summer of 2025, Marika Che found herself staring up at a wall that she had covered in photographs, feeling like the slightly deranged protagonist in a detective-thriller. Rather than solving a murder, however, Che was bringing to life the cinematic world of Bright Flame. She covered her wall in soft-hued planetary bodies and her own photographs of plants, cornfields, and the sky.

“I’ve always seen extensive visuals while writing music; I can't really separate the music from the visuals because they feel like they come from the same place. So I guess it’s not too surprising that I was overcome with an impulse to give this world I was creating inside my head a physical form,” she says. “It taught me something about Bright Flame when I could see it all taped-up on the wall like that.”

What she discovered was a central tension of the album: on one side; safety, security, and groundedness, and on the other; mystery, wildness, and aliveness. On Bright Flame Che invites us to walk with her between these two polarities. 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 still always alive to the beauty around her.

Photo Credit: Miró Myung Justad