The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.

Lucinda Chua’s father is waiting for our interview to end. He’s finished making scones with kaya, a sweet coconut egg jam flavored with pandan leaves, and has informed his daughter that it’s time to close out of Zoom and come downstairs to eat.

Chua is visiting her parents’ home in Milton Keynes, a mid-sized city 50 miles northwest of the English capital, built in the 1960s to relieve housing congestion. When she moved there from London at age 11, she thought of it — as city kids relegated to the suburbs tend to do — as a dead zone. “It’s most famous for having concrete cows,” she says. “It was the place no bands ever toured to.”

She lives back in London now. Her trip home is scheduled downtime following a concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where she played tracks from her debut album, YIAN, and the two Antidotes EPs that came before it — patient songs, full of open questions. Preceded by a guided meditation session, the show was her first time playing the new music with a “big band” arrangement that added harp and backing vocals to Chua’s cello and voice. “I was looking out into the crowd, and there was this one girl who was really feeling it, like, ‘This is my song!’” she says. “I was like, “Wow, this isn’t my song anymore. This is your song.’”

Chua’s songs are intentionally habitable — three-dimensional structures where we can walk around, get lost, and learn new things about ourselves. In post-production, she approaches them like a masochistic interior decorator would her own home, gleefully trashing her most prized possessions. “That’s my biggest flex,” she says. “When you’re in the studio and you do something impressive, it’s such a power move to get to the end of a song and be like, ‘That was the best thing that I did, but I’m gonna take it out because I don’t need it.’”

As a result, Chua’s songs throb with longing, mourning the parts of themselves her listeners will never get to hear. They’re slow-burning but never static, holding their most impactful details in their darkest corners. Take “Somebody Who,” a warped, discomfiting cut from Antidotes 1: “Even though it’s using a lot of classical instruments, it has these anarchic hard cuts that are very anti-nostalgia, where it’s like a door’s closing in your face,” she says, “and then the door’s melting and you see this epic horizon line.”

If the 10 tracks on YIAN feel more understated than her earlier releases, it’s by design. The album is meant to be circular, a stream of sound that loops back on itself. On a project like that, pacing is important. “In holding back, you’re making people lean in,” she says.

Still, YIAN contains moments of extreme joy and pain, and sometimes both at once. In its opener, “Golden,” Chua reassures her younger self that things get better (“When the sunlight hits me / I’m golden, you’ll see”). The song’s landscape is fraught with doubt, though, and the affirmations are delivered in fragments, incomplete transmissions from a brighter place.

Much of the longing on YIAN comes from the placelessness Chua felt growing up in Milton Keynes as a child of Chinese-Malaysian and English parents. The album’s title is part of Siew-Yian, the name Chua’s parents gave her to strengthen her connection to her Chinese roots. ”Yian” translates directly to “swallow,” a migratory bird constantly in search of a shore. The record, too, is perpetually adrift, full of unresolved tension despite its soft touch. Its cover shows Chua floating in space, three icelike wings sprouting from her back.

That image is part of the visual language Chua created for the album with her friend Nhu Xuan Hua. In the music video for “Echo,” Chua appears in separate frames wearing white and red, surrounded by snow and roses, mirroring herself as she moves in her own modified form of traditional Chinese dance. “I won’t be your echo,” she sings, and backing vocals echo the final word behind her in harmony. As the track nears its climax, her two selves begin to subtly separate, finding identities of their own.

The rose, Chua explains, is associated in the U.K. with a quintessentially English (and white) type of beauty, but the flower is actually indigenous to Asia. “I wanted the rose to become a metaphor for the Asian diaspora,” she says, “an icon we could reclaim as belonging to us equally, having its roots in our ancestral homeland but known and beloved across the world.” She’s just finished recording YIAN’s follow-up EP, Reclaiming the Rose.

Chua recently returned to Malaysia with her father for the first time since her childhood. There, she visited Penang, where her grandmother lived before she passed, and her father’s hometown of Kuching, where she met cousins she’d never known. Her roots in China are more tangled: Like many immigrant families, her ancestors left under duress, long enough ago that no one in her family remembers what region they came from.

“I realized that even if I did the DNA spit-in-a-cup test and someone gave me the postcode of the village, that wouldn’t be the answer I was looking for,” she says. “I was looking for people and connection and community, and that’s something making YIAN has brought me.” Despite her lack of 23andMe documentation, her recent show in Shanghai felt like a homecoming.

On YIAN’s closer, “Something Other Than Years,” Chua is still searching for somewhere to land — a path through life that’s more than killing time. In the record’s most unexpected, touching moment, she’s joined by the glitch-pop artist yeule, whose voice sounds completely serene, floating high above Chua’s like a star to guide her through the dark. It’s the only song on the album that resolves to its harmonic root.

“It’s taken me time to figure out what I actually like, what’s important to me when no one else is watching,” Chua tells me when I ask her if she’s found any solutions to that song’s central puzzle. “Underneath it all, it’s the really basic things: sharing food with people I care about, chatting with friends, making things with my hands, picking up a new skill so I feel like I’m growing.” Downstairs, her dad is waiting with scones and kaya.

YIAN is out now via 4AD. Lucinda Chua recently announced her first two headlining shows in North America, scheduled for next February.

Stylist: Matt King

Update, November 10: Tickets to Lucinda Chua’s shows in New York and Los Angeles are now on sale.