Audrey Nuna Announces Sophomore Album ‘Trench’

Audrey Nuna has been thinking a lot about duality, and how two polar opposite feelings and emotions can exist at the same time. It’s part of what inspired her album Trench, which she exclusively announces with Rolling Stone. She’s also sharing her new single “Mine,” which showcases a darker and colder side of her artistry. “Mine” softly interpolates Brandy and Monica’s “The Boy is Mine” into an almost robotic, club-ready banger.

“I think [the title Trench] illustrated the fact that this album is a tapestry of growing pains and a lot of conflicting emotions,” the Korean American musician tells Rolling Stone. “The question I kept returning to was: How do you stay human? How do you stay soft as you learn of all the turbulence and all the harsh realities of the world around you?”

Across the album, Nuna will embody a bionic hero as she traverses through songs that highlight her lyricism and vocals, along with her rap chops and raging beats. She’s dividing the LP in two parts: Hard Skin and Soft Feelings. She says the first half marks a new beginning with “slightly more romantic questions about what’s happening around you” while the second side reflects her album’s character “going through change and realizing there’s no way to unsee the things that she’s seen.”

Nuna sees this album as a clear “evolution” from her debut album, A Liquid Breakfast, which included a collab with Jack Harlow, and which she says was more like spring with warm weather, whereas this album feels more like winter. “Trench is the parallel universe that’s much darker, takes place in the nighttime, and is much colder. Trench has more frustration and anger woven into it,” she says. “They’re very different but very parallel.”

To write this project, Nuna packed her things and took her closest collaborators to the desert to allow herself to “go back to basics.” She had tried going to songwriting sessions with new collaborators, but quickly realized it wouldn’t work for her — at least for this project. She says the songwriting process ended up feeling like “a search.”

“We created an intimate and safe space to allow things to happen as opposed to having a strict agenda. It made such a huge difference,” Nuna says. “I allow songs to happen and creating that space is step one… I took my time with each verse.”

Nuna says she hopes her fans go in with an open mind because she “tried a lot of new shit on this project,” including new sounds, harsher lyrical styles, and much more anger. “That was really cathartic for me,” Nuna says. “As weird and experimental as some of this shit, I hope it gives you some sense of feeling understood.”