The wide world can sometimes feel like an alien place. Taking their name from two contrasting sensations, indie duo ChiliChill deal with that unfamiliarity with a combination of zesty energy and laidback cool. Formed in 2020, the songwriting and production team of Yu H. (Yu Hao) and CuSummer (Xia Tongzi) got their start making songs for synthesised Vocaloid artists but soon began using their own voices on singles and soundtrack cuts for an audience of anime and gaming fans. Their vocal debut album, 2022’s I Feel Hungry Every Night, infused R&B hooks and indie-pop ballads with a quirky sense of humour. Following a national tour, their 2024 follow-up Blending into Human finds the duo’s chill more contemplative and their spice more fuller-bodied as they consider larger questions of living as a member of society. These big questions are matched by big sounds. Synth-pop is the album’s defining style, from the inspirational, aspirational title track to opener “Hengshan Road Wanping Road”, which considers life at a crossroads. The duo’s production gives a bigger sound to the vocals too—and not just on the electrifying multi-tracked choruses. Xia takes her voice into new dimensions, with dramatic pyrotechnics on funk-flavoured “Show Slay Slow” and sassy backing vocals that lend a K-pop girl-group vibe to kiss-off anthem “Mind Your Own Business”. Staying true to their subculture roots, the duo regularly release instrumental tracks for streamers to remix and contribute songs to Genshin Impact events. And on this album, they feature ACG singer-songwriter 三无Marblue on the showstopping duet “Act”. Below, ChiliChill share with Apple Music insights into selected album tracks. “Hengshan Road Wanping Road” “The title refers to a six-way intersection in Shanghai with two more streets than a standard crossroads. To the south is the Xujiahui commercial district; to the north is Huaihai Road, a major shopping street. Between these two bustling areas is a quiet, elegant avenue. When the light turns green, it’s time to move on—but there’s no one at the intersection to say which of the roads leads forward.” “Show Slay Show” “We tried out different vocal techniques for this one. Before the song’s release, our friends who heard the demo all reacted the same way: ‘Who’s singing this?’ They thought it featured a different singer.” “Act” “We asked Marblue to sing on this one. One day we got a message saying that Marblue mentioned us during a livestream and said she hoped we could work together. We were right in the middle of producing ‘Act’ and were looking for a female voice to duet, so the collaboration came together naturally. We’ve never actually worked together in person—to this day we’re still just online friends—but we discovered she can really carry on a "musical" conversation. And recording more than 60 tracks remotely that then had to be synced up was a novel experience.” “The Beautiful Life of a Non-Human” “This track is a prelude to ‘Mind Your Own Business’, because the protagonist of that song lives a quiet life in paradise—apart from happening to have two noisy neighbours. So we wanted to ease you in with gentle strings before you’re plunged into the clamour of the main song.” “Mind Your Own Business” “Back in early 2022, when we had just released our first album, we really planned on going for a double-tap by starting production on album two immediately. But we got halfway and then felt like the only way to make progress was to let things settle a little. Besides, we were starting to plan a tour the following year, so we set the album aside. When we got back into it in 2024, we rejected a lot of the demos we had initially selected—but we kept this, a particularly abstract one. The accompaniment is a chopped and rearranged sample of one of our instrumental tracks, ‘Walking in the Rain’, put through some really chaotic sound design to make it interesting to the ear.” “Plantain in the Night Rain” Xia: “‘You ask after my return; the date is not set. Autumn rains pool at night in the Ba mountains. When can we two trim the wick in the western window and talk of the Ba mountains’ night rains?’ This poem—‘Sending a Note North on a Rainy Night’—is this song’s inspiration. You’re required to memorise it in secondary school. I may have graduated long ago, but I whenever I see the characters ba (‘plantain’) and yu (‘rain’), I recite the poem on the spot. Coincidentally, the poem describes Li Shangyin’s longing for his far-off wife, which turns out to complement the core of this song.” “Blending into Human” “If this song had been born just a little earlier, we’d definitely have planned a large-scale video and a big rollout. But our budget was limited and the video slots were already taken. It’s the second-to-last song we completed for the album, so even if the concept was perfect we’d missed our chance. We leave it to your imagination—and that might not be a bad choice anyway.” “The Bird’s Tale” “We brought in the Bye Zoo Choir for this song. Some listeners might find that name familiar—weren’t they the children’s chorus on ‘I’ve Never Forgotten’? Right you are! But they’ve grown up quickly. Actually, the choir has lots of members spanning a wide range of ages. A group of eight teenagers worked with us on this one.” “Ephemeral Night Before the Move” “We’ve moved house lots of times, most recently from Beijing to Shanghai. The day we left, all our furniture had been packed and loaded onto a long-distance truck to get on the road ahead of us. All we had left was a mattress and duvet set up in the middle of the bedroom—and that’s how we spent the last night of our sojourn in Beijing. The floor was probably too hard, because we lay awake the whole night.” “Thxnks” Yu: “The motivation for this song came on a summer day four or five years ago. I happened across it when I was organising demos this year. It was a noisy recording so I had to listen carefully to figure out what exactly I was humming. From the recording quality, I probably hadn’t even washed my hair that day.” “The Five-Yuan Umbrella” Yu: “The music came together quickly for this song. We were asked to produce a song for a home appliance company, and although our work on the album meant we had to turn down the request, I was a little inspired by the notion of home appliances. I remembered how when I was young, we had a green refrigerator that would always hum when it turned on, a hyperactive washing machine with separate wash and spin drums that had to be filled by hand, and an old television set that turned on to a screen full of snow. A few melodies came to mind very naturally. I fired up my recording software and quickly laid down a complete track called ‘Home Appliances’—verse, chorus and bridge—in two minutes 21 seconds. And afterwards we didn’t change a single note.”