This is the work newsletter of Kyle Chayka. You may know me from my column as a staff writer at The New Yorker; my most recent book, Filterworld; my first book, The Longing for Less; or maybe even IRL. I also run the newsletter One Thing, which is about quality in culture. I post on Bluesky, X, and Instagram.
For years now I’ve been fascinated by this YouTube video that chops out the chorus of a TikTok-famous song called “Tek It” and loops it for ten minutes straight. The video is an audio overdose, excising the most addictive part of a track to listen to it over and over again — it’s almost more ASMR than actual music. I’ve always wanted to hear about the band Cafuné’s experience of having “Tek It” go mega-viral on TikTok in 2022 and adapting to the new realm of compressed, looped, user-remixed music online. So their new album Bite Reality coming out September 12 gave me the perfect chance to write a column about the whole thing:
The band told me about the pressure of creating content in order to promote their music and the ways in which the audience now has power over how songs sound. Here’s a paragraph:
“Tek It” became one of the emblematic songs of TikTok’s rise in the United States. Riding its momentum, Cafuné signed to the major record label Elektra. “Everyone who goes viral is immediately pressed with the same task, which is to keep the ball in the air,” Yoo said. The band hustled to build their social-media accounts, play shows, and produce a new EP. They also put out an official sped-up version of “Tek It,” replicating the most popular online iteration. “Tek It” and its variations now have more than a billion streams on Spotify, a success by any measure. But the band’s boom was short-lived. In 2024, Cafuné was dropped from Elektra amid a wave of music-industry restructuring. “That amount of profit wasn’t enough to convince anyone of anything,” Yoo said. Cut loose, the duo decided to use their earnings to spend a whole year acting like a more traditional band: writing songs full time, guided by nothing other than their creative whims. They put together an album to release on their own independent label, Aurelians Club, and signed a distribution deal with SoundOn, TikTok’s in-house musician platform. Schat told me mordantly, “It’s funny that the TikTok corporation gave us more favorable terms than any label was capable of giving.” Every musician today is forced to become a content creator, “whether they want to be or not,” Yoo added. “It feels like we’ve all become, like, employees for platforms.”
Listen to the very fun lead single “e-Asphyxiation” — the lyrics are all about the frustration of not wanting to be so online: I don’t want to post my face anymore. (Fans often compare Cafuné’s music to the outro of a 90s anime, that should tell you if you’ll like it.) It’s very relatable; the internet is so toxic but we kind of have no choice but to interact with it if we want to be heard as musicians / writers / artists / citizens.
More new music
Nourished By Time is one of the few new musicians / bands I’ve gotten really into in the last year or two. (Otherwise I’ve just been going deep into the ‘60s jazz and samba archives, I’m guilty.) His new album The Passionate Ones is out now and it’s great. The vibe is a bit indescribable. Soaring vocals, abstracted lyrics, wavy synths, twisted samples, dancey club beats like a rave in an abandoned brutalist building. It feels very new. Start with the bouncy “9 2 5” or my current fav “Baby Baby”.




