Minh's Major Push to Break out of the Underground

The singer has spent years building an impressive discography all on his own. With his mature new EP Bad for Me, he says, “I feel like I’ve blended all these influences into something that’s uniquely mine.”

Last month, Minh traveled to Los Angeles to begin shooting promo materials for his new EP, Bad for Me.

In Houston, he told me recently, “There really isn’t a music community for me out here.” Minh has lived in Houston his whole life. He attends college here and self-produces all of his music in his bedroom. Going to Los Angeles, he said, was a way to step outside of that bubble. “Even though LA’s not home,” he explained, “it feels like home.” 

Minh had also begun to feel that his music was playing things a bit too safe. It could be bigger, more ambitious, more energetic.

For the past five years, Minh has largely built his career on his own. But lately, he’s begun thinking more seriously about how to expand beyond the world he’s already built for himself. He wants bigger music, bigger moments, and a presentation capable of reaching people beyond the audience he’s already built. Bad for Me is, in many ways, his attempt to make that push.

While in LA, Minh shot a music video for “bad4me,” the EP’s opening title track, where Minh knowingly ignores red flags to be with a girl. “I know you’re bad for me, but I’m still gonna take you back with me,” he tells her. 

Minh worked with stvphn, Brandon Park, Xander Fernandez, and others to shoot the “bad4me” video. “It was really cool to see what the process looks like when you’re not in your bedroom shooting videos yourself or working with one or two friends to put something together,” he told me. “Having a full production team, where we’ve got Xander on the leaf blower or stvphn shouting out cues… You don’t really imagine all the moving parts that go into it. It was definitely an eye-opening experience for me.” 

The bigger production doesn’t mean Minh is leaving his DIY approach behind. Nearly all of his discography is still self-written and self-produced. Instead, he’s becoming more interested in seeing how far he can take what he started in his bedroom. 

If Bad for Me sounds like a step up for Minh, it’s intentional. “I feel like I’ve grown more confident,” he explained, and you can hear it in the music. His mixing has improved, and his lyrics have gotten more direct and specific to his own thoughts.

He points to his past EPs as an example of how he’s evolved. On each of those records, there was at least one song he considered a “throwaway,” or one he wasn’t sure about including. With Bad for Me, he feels differently.

“I have faith. I feel strongly about the songs. I don’t have any reservations. There’s nothing I feel is a true weak point on the EP.”

The intention was never to make an EP.

The shift had already begun on Minh’s previous EP, amends, which was released last year. If you paid close attention, you could hear hints of where he was headed on tracks like “moon,” a song he told me has over 100 layers of production and vocals. He particularly liked “bad habits” because “it had a little more energy than my previous work, and it felt risky to me.”

At the beginning of this year, Minh continued experimenting with that direction through a string of singles, but he had no intention of building them into a larger project. He simply wanted to make new music and see where it took him.

Things began to fall into place when he made “Silhouette.” The track pushed the sound he’d been experimenting with into heavier territory, pairing harder production with a newfound confidence and flirtatious energy. Minh realized it fit naturally alongside “no other body,” another single that was beginning to pop off on streaming.

“I realized, ‘Okay, I like where this is going.’ That honestly directed the rest of the EP for me.”

By the time he made “Tattoo,” he had three songs that felt like they belonged together. “So how can I build around this?” he wondered.

The answer became Bad for Me: a bolder, harder and more immediate version of the music Minh had already been moving toward. The title track opens the EP with Minh knowingly giving in to a relationship he knows is bad for him. By the closer, “virtues,” some of that bravado has worn off. He looks at the chaos with more clarity and takes responsibility for his part: “You’re bad for me / I’m bad for you.”

While Bad for Me marks a new direction for Minh, he still wouldn’t call it a full rebrand.

“I think it’s still within the vein of what I’ve been doing, but I did want to lean into a harder sound,” he said, adding, “maybe more mature, a little bit less sweet and innocent sounding.”

It’s also some of the most fun he’s had making music.“I’m realizing the music can still be dark and atmospheric without being so restrained. It can hit hard, it can be catchy, it can have these huge moments.” he said.

But the change hasn’t only come from spending more time in the studio. Minh has also started thinking about what his music needs to sound like outside of his bedroom.

“The more shows I play, the more I realize how much fun the higher-energy songs are—working the crowd and having those big moments,” he explained. “No hate to my old self, but I definitely wasn’t thinking about how some of those songs would translate live.” 

Performing has pushed Minh outside of his comfort zone in other ways, too. He’s been an introvert for most of his life, which makes his growing comfort onstage somewhat unexpected. 

“It’s funny, I’ve never been great at talking to people or being in front of a crowd,” he explained. “But performing feels a lot more natural because I’m doing something I actually enjoy, and I know everyone’s just there to have a good time.”

That comfort with being seen has started to carry over offstage, too. For the first few years of his career, Minh often covered or obscured himself in photos and on social media. But as he’s gotten older, started playing more shows and seen a bigger response to his music, he’s begun to wonder whether that anonymity might be holding him back.

“Especially now that I’m playing shows, what’s the point of being faceless?” he said. “They can see me anyway.”

That visibility is part of a broader shift in how Minh wants to present himself as an artist. He points to artists who have managed to move from a DIY, bedroom-made image toward something that can exist more seamlessly in the mainstream as a path he’s interested in following. 

“That’s kind of what I’m striving for,” he said, describing it as “that kind of momentum where you have this new brand and the people who are already there are intrigued because it’s new, but you’re also able to capture an entirely new audience.”

The new direction has also complicated a question Minh used to have an easy answer for: What exactly does his music sound like?

In college, he’d often meet people who’d ask him, “What kind of music do you make? What does it sound like?” In the past, he could easily point to other artists as reference points.

“But now I honestly don’t know what to tell them,” he said. “I feel like I’ve blended all these influences into something that’s uniquely mine.”

When he thinks about what makes a song sound like “Minh,” though, he still can’t point to a solid description.

“I wish I knew,” he said.

What feels stranger to Minh is the possibility that someone else might eventually use his name as that reference point.

“That would be crazy if people were like, ‘Yo, I want to sound like Minh,’” he said. “But I don’t even know how you do that. I’m Minh but I don’t know how to sound like Minh, honestly.”

Maybe not having an easy answer anymore is part of the point. Minh isn’t trying to discard what he’s made before. But after five years of releasing music, he’s becoming less interested in fitting neatly into the identity he started with and more interested in seeing how far he can push it.

That also means paying attention to whether people outside of his existing audience are responding.

“I want people to think, ‘Yo, this is so dope. My friends need to hear this right now.’ If that’s not what’s happening, I’m not doing it right. That’s really my goal right now.”

In some ways, Minh can look back at the past five years and see how far he’s come. In other ways, he feels like it’s time—or rather, it’s his time—to finally prove himself.

“I really do feel like I need to make a big push to break out of the underground,” he said. “I know it takes time, but I do want to do this full-time and see my dreams actualized.”

There is some irony in his confidence. In the past, whenever Minh released an EP, he would convince himself that this would be the one to finally blow up and make him a major artist. When those projects didn’t perform the way he imagined, it could be disappointing, even demoralizing.

Bad for Me hasn’t cured him of that instinct.

“But I do feel that way about this one too,” he said.

If it made him sound delusional, he didn’t care.

“I still have the same amount of faith in it—this kind of brashness of, ‘You know what? Fuck it. This is going to work. I’m going to make it work.’”