In 2022, Ena Mori made a case for her place in pop with ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’ – a bold and colourful debut album from a mixed-race misfit who turned her pain into defiant, dance-ready electronic pop anthems for outcasts everywhere. “All you need is a crown in our heads / All you need is yourself…’Cuz I’m the king of the night!” she chants in set staple and crowd favourite ‘King Of The Night!’.
NME declared ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’ a “clarion call for those just a little different, for those still daring to try” in a five-star review; it later topped our list of the best Asian albums of 2022. The singer-songwriter also took home Album Of The Year at the 36th Awit Awards, essentially the Philippines’ equivalent of the Grammys. “When I got all that, I thought, I guess it’s all downhill from here,” Mori now tells NME with a laugh, then gives the table a superstitious knock. “Huwag naman” – “Hopefully not!”
She needn’t have worried. The three years since that milestone have been a blur of “surprising”, “crazy” and “surreal” moments for Mori – from playing to an audience of 5,000 in Singapore in support of Aurora (“One of the scariest moments of my life. I felt like a little pea, it was just me and a keyboard”) to hearing her song ’Trust Me’ used, unadulterated, in a Häagen-Dazs Japan commercial (“12-year-old Ena would piss her pants. Them not asking me to tweak the song was a great compliment”). She’s won over audiences worldwide at showcase festivals – notably South by Southwest (SXSW) in Texas, Sydney and London; her international profile is only set to grow given her spot on the rosters of United Talent Agency and Norway-based Made Management (home of Aurora and Sigrid, to name a few).
The Manila-based Mori, who holds a part-time job as a Japanese tutor, is thoughtful about what it takes to sustain an artist’s life and career. “If I rely on music solely to make money, I think it maybe takes away from me creating what I want. I’d be so conscious about what would profit, instead of focusing on what I really want to hear,” she says. In 2023, she raised funds to get to SXSW in Austin by selling clothes from her closet and playing pay-what-you-can gigs in Manila. She shrugs off this reality: “Coming from a Southeast Asian country, it feels like you need to put in double the effort for something as significant as playing a show in America,” she says. But the 26-year-old understands fully why she’s determined to stay in this difficult industry.
“Making music for me is honestly a self-love activity”
As she puts it, “making music for me is honestly a self-love activity.” Growing up in Japan to a Filipino mum and Japanese dad, Mori clung to pop songs for comfort when school bullies picked on her for being mixed-race. On her debut album, she sought to recreate that feeling of safety and sticking up for herself, but admits thinking that “probably only a really niche group would dig my music. I didn’t expect so many people to resonate with it and I wasn’t looking to get acclaim – but support from these prestigious places and from fans has been such a boost of motivation and made me feel like I could keep on this path.”
Mori started down the music-making path early, learning piano at six and composing her own pieces by 10. She then trained in classical music and hit competition circuits around Tokyo and her suburban hometown of Kanagawa. At 15, Mori moved to Manila, took up music production in college and spun her thesis into a self-released, three-track EP. She later played keys for local acts before signing with Offshore Music, the independent label founded by Eraserheads frontman and Filipino music legend Ely Buendia. “He’s a really quiet person,” Mori says. “I appreciate that he doesn’t offer creative input, he just trusts my artistry and where I want to go with my sound.”
Crafted with her college batchmate and co-producer/collaborator of seven years Tim Marquez (aka timothy Run), Mori’s sound thrives on maximalism. Funky breakbeats and lush orchestral swells form the backdrop for her vocal trills, whisper-wails and occasional forays into rhythmic spoken word. She pulls from a wild mix of influences, spanning J-pop, Cher and Jay-Z to Rachmaninov, Bach and Avril Lavigne.
“It’s funny because I used to hate Bach when I was learning classical. His pieces aren’t really dynamic because it’s essentially music for the church. He wasn’t really celebrated for his creativity, but more for his fundamentals and musical lines or motifs,” Mori explains, her cherry-painted nails playing air piano before she claps them together. “As a teen I liked Avril Lavigne and Paramore more because I thought they were cooler than Bach. But now that I’m older, I appreciate his cadences and I can hear him in my music.”
Geeking out about classical music is easy for Mori, who wisecracks about how “Vivaldi is someone’s Taylor Swift, basically”. She speaks with the same enthusiasm about crafting songs that push the music forward. “I don’t want to just be one-dimensional. I want to make music that contains teeny tiny things that I love with all the songs I’ve heard and all the sounds that I appreciate. There are so many!” she gushes. “It’s been like a little challenge I’ve created for myself, to explore other sounds that I can incorporate in my music while keeping that ear candyness of pop. It’s what gives me the high in making songs.”
Right now, Mori is riding the high of her twin EPs’ slow rollout: starting with the recently released ‘rOe’ (titled after the delicate fish eggs of her childhood meals in Japan), and concluding next year with ‘ORE’ (after the earthly rock). A play on hard and soft, the EPs’ themes of yearning for innocence and wide-eyed wonder can be traced back to Mori’s childhood – a throughline in her songwriting. But unlike “the louder the better approach” of ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’, ‘rOe’ is “more an internal monologue than an outward statement” of not quite wanting to grow up yet.
“It’s this in-between spot, or alanganin in Tagalog. I feel so much pressure to kind of figure out my life as an adult but I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time. Compared to when I was a child, when I had no control over anything, but it felt like my life was packed with so much,” Mori says.
“I don’t want to just be one-dimensional”
But she’s quick to point out that it’s not about romanticising the past. “Nostalgia is not always good. Looking back to the past can be a bit chilling for me sometimes, and emotionally I wanted to capture that eerie feeling on this record.” She does as much in fourth track ‘Sink’, where a vindictive narrator threatens their abuser with payback: “Let me watch you sink / sink sink sink in deep deep water… you deserve all the pain / the pain the way I’ve been through,” she declares in the chorus. It ends on the ominous line: “It’s time to be quiet.”
Like her music, Mori’s visual language leans into whimsy, eccentricity and excess. She’s big on camp and costumes – donning eye patches, bunny ears, even an octopus perched on her head – and also at home in airy oversized dresses and Harajuku-cool outfits. But Mori also slips in subtle nods to her records: like dyeing her hair fiery-red for ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’ and painting crimson dots around her eyes and cheeks for ‘rOe’. On that EP’s cover, Mori sits inside a translucent sphere, surrounded by her inky-black tresses. “I wanted to create thought-provoking art that could make people curious enough to peek into the songs,” she says.
In the chorus of the record’s most-streamed track, ‘Portion Control’, Mori alludes to an insatiable appetite: “I just want it all… I just don’t know how to portion control”. It sounds like a statement of intent – not just of a person with wants and needs, but also a singer-songwriter with bigger ambitions in pop.
But Mori shakes her head. Does she not consider herself ambitious or competitive? “I hate competition. Maybe I’m too soft for it,” she replies. “I’m also such a bad planner that I’ll probably have an answer today, and then in like two weeks, my answer will be different,” she laughs.
“But really, I just want to keep making music that I love and I think that’s the only virtue to this. Being onstage is the most alive I am. My job or my task is to just show up, be vulnerable and be bold, and hope people feel it.”
Ena Mori’s ‘rOe’ is out now via Offshore Music.
Listen to Ena Mori’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Khyne Palumar
Photography & Editing: Ennuh Tiu
Photography Assistance: Sean Olalo
Makeup: Slo Lopez
Hair: Magpatina
Production Design: FABSETS
Location: Studio Commons
Label: Offshore Music
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