pryme! Code Switched So Hard He Became A Musician

Growing up, pryme! learned how to fit into other peoples’ expectations for him. As he’s begun to release music and find an audience, pryme! says, “I can be seen.”

. “As I’ve gotten more into this sound and as I’ve started to expand, I’ve really invested in this throwback sound,” pryme! says.

If you’re not locked into the indie music scene, you might have overlooked pryme!, a 19-year-old Filipino-American, whose brilliant R&B music is rising monthly on Spotify and delivering him a solid fanbase. 

The rapper Nimstarr once called him “Mr. Throwback”, an accurate nickname that pryme considers an honor. Listen to his most popular single “you” and you’ll hear exactly the references. At his most compelling, like my favorite track - a banger called “rmbr me” - pryme’s music sounds like that period in the early 2010s when Justin Bieber was conquering the world. His light, versatile voice can tear up a pop beat or a throwback R&B track – all of which he makes at home in his bedroom with barely interference from other producers or musicians. 

“I’m really just making what I like,” pryme told me recently in an interview from Las Vegas, where he’s currently based. “As I’ve gotten more into this sound and as I’ve started to expand, I’ve really invested in this throwback sound.” 

Pryme is most inspired by the R&B music that was popular when he was a child, and he’s spent the past year developing a sonic landscape that sounds straight of the golden age of Y2K R&B. 

“I just love how R&B songs back in the day were about yearning for someone,” he explained. “It’s about love but it’s also about treating your loved one right. I think there’s something nice and refreshing about hearing R&B and it being about innocent love or having respect for someone. I think it’s cool to put that into my music.”

Although pryme has only released a handful of singles, he’s currently building a collection of music that will be his first EP. It’s been a fun if not overwhelming challenge, he told me, as he tries to figure out how to create a cohesive body of music. 

“I had no plans on making an EP,” pryme admitted. An EP was intimidating for a number of reasons. But perhaps the greatest one, pryme said, was that “music being a hobby is what keeps me from burnout.” 

But as pryme has started to develop his artistry, the decision to release an EP has felt less like a burden and more like a realistic next step. Plus, he explained, he now has help from some artists he admires. Raeningg, a producer pryme is a fan of, DM’d him and offered to work with him after finding his music on TikTok. From there, he connected pryme to the producer and musician 808toofly. He’s still surprised that two artists whose music he loves so much want to work with him. 

“I’ve tried not to be a fanboy,” pryme told me, his voice rising with excitement. “But I love typing in all caps! I can’t help it.” 

When I was first introduced to pryme, it was through brynne, a mutual friend and peer of pryme’s. Like pryme, brynne is a Filipino American musician on the come-up in the West Coast independent music scene. 

“He’s got such an interesting life story to tell you,” brynne told me when he threw out pryme as a recommendation. 

When I message pryme this a few days before the interview, he responded, “INTERESTING!? LMAOO”. Then, “we’ll see.” 

But his story is one that grapples with identity and displacement, something that many Asian Americans can relate to. Pryme’s father was in the air force, which meant that every few years, his family would move around the world, sometimes moving as far away as Germany and then landing somewhere in the Midwest like North Dakota. 

“I’ve lived in many places and every place I’ve lived, I haven’t lived there very long,” pryme continued. “I usually just say I’m from Seattle because it’s where I lived the longest.”

In hindsight, pyme felt the most at ease in Hawaii. It was the first time, he told me, that he had been around other Filipinos. “It felt like, out of all the places I’ve lived, it was the easiest place to live because there were people just like me.” 

After Hawaii,his father was stationed in Idaho, and pryme found himself surrounded by middle class white kids “who had known each other since they were fetuses.” Being in a minority in a small town wasn’t easy; neither was making friends with kids who already had tight bonds. 

In order to win friends, pryme learned how to be the person others wanted him to be. 

“I didn’t know that I was code switching at the time. I just thought that was everyone’s life; that everyone moved every two years,” he remembered. “But then, overtime, I realized that I am this way because I’m a military brat.” 

Pryme was also dealing with ADHD. “Ever since I was young, I would pick up hobbies and I drop them really quickly,” he remembered. Growing up, he would obsess over volcanoes, animals or dinosaurs, hyperfixating on each obsession “and sucking everything I could out of it before moving on to the next thing.” 

But that didn’t happen when he discovered music in the third grade. In fact, pryme doubled down on the hobby. 

“The appeal to music is that because I had to code switch so much growing up, I became a people pleaser,” he said. “I held my tongue in a lot of situations and I suppressed my thoughts. I never got to say what I wanted to say.” 

He continued, “Music is so expressive and I’m able to speak with confidence when otherwise I wouldn’t be able to.” 

Pryme never felt like he fit in with his peers who tried to act nonchalant themselves. Those kids felt disingenuous and, also, incredibly boring. Pryme gravitated, instead, towards people who weren’t self-conscious about passions that could be labeled weird. 

“Everyone wants to act like nothing matters. That’s something I’ve grown to resent so much. I love when people show their passions,” he said. “When I stream on Twitch, I show that I love Rubik's cubes and my nerdy passions.” 

As he began creating music, pryme wanted his passion to show in the work he put into stacking the melodies or producing the beats to recreate that nostalgic R&B sound. Though his first few tries were covers, eventually pryme moved to making original music.

Today, he sees the music he created in high school as “ass”. But he’s kept the music up on his abandoned SoundCloud in part to show how far he’s come. 

“What gave me the courage to do this was not giving a fuck. Everyone had to start somewhere and I was just excited to give it a try,” he said., “I could have never expected myself to be where I am now from when I was posting those shitty songs on SoundCloud. I was just like, fuck it, you know? 

Pryme has never stepped foot in a studio – something that he’s proud of. Instead,he prefers to work alone at home in his own “safe space” because of how personal his music is. 

“There’s something about someone else writing my lyrics or doing the melodies for me that feels suppressive,” he explained. “So, I actually prefer to work alone on my songs. If how the melodies or lyrics are written is taken away, then that’s taking pryme away!” 

Those instincts are proving to be right. As his following has grown, pryme admitted, he’s been inclined to check out the numbers even though that’s sometimes built up anxiety. When I ask how he deals with self-doubt, especially when he’s in such a competitive field, he said simply, “I have  to remember my core values when it comes to music, especially when I have really bad imposter syndrome.” 

Pryme compares artists who have to overexplain themselves to their audience to a character in a movie that outlines the plot too explicitly. “I think being genuine with yourself as an artist is what helps with your own self-doubt. I think a lot of mainstream artists treat their audiences like they’re dumb,” he said. “It’s very obvious through their art that I'm just a number to them.” 

Pryme’s focus on staying true to himself is what brings him back to his ultimate goal as an artist: to show his passion. “I love when people are unafraid to be cringe,” he said with a laugh. “I embrace the cringe.” 

Pryme thought back to the years he spent suppressing his feelings in childhood in order to make others like him. Maybe he couldn’t say how he was feeling or didn’t even know how to verbalize those emotions. But by creating a new persona with pryme, he has put the code switching to good use: Now pryme can project the best version of himself to audiences. He can be someone that isn’t worried about whether you like him or not. 

“Now that I’m making music the appeal is that it’s very personal to me. With every release,” he added, “I can be this extra confident version of me that says what I want to say. I can be seen.”