Orion Sun is in love with the process. “I feel like my most shallow and my deepest self when I’m in the recording process, because I’m digging deep but to everyone in my life, that’s all I can talk about,” she laughs.” And so after two years in creation mode, it’s no surprise that she’s still coming to terms with what life looks like outside of the studio. “Not being there feels weird, I feel weird! But I went to a flea market today for the first time,” she says proudly.

The child of two artists, raised in South Jersey, now based in Los Angeles, Orion has cultivated a huge cult following with her singular lane of intoxicatingly intimate alt R&B and warmly analogue aesthetics. Featured on the opener of Fred Again’s latest album USB, having supported Daniel Caesar on his 2023 tour, been sampled by Bryson Tiller and amassing almost 5 million monthly listeners on Spotify, all as an independent artist, the 28-year-old is primed and giddy to release her self-titled album Orion. The name alone signifies the gradual build up to this moment, she explains. “[Orion] is a hunter and that mentality, you know, you need patience when you’re out there. You could be there for days.

Waiting for that perfect sound, that perfect feeling.” Following three critically acclaimed projects of her own in A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams (2017), Hold Space For Me (2020) and Getaway (2022), though Orion is not her debut, in many ways it feels like it. Sparked by a big, deep heartbreak (unlike the times she thought she was heartbroken before), Orion embarks on a journey of self-discovery, grief and growth. “It [was] time to get to know me again as an adult,” she says. And the result is a meditation on love in all of its raw, tangled beauty and ugliness too. “I just wanted to be as bare bones emotionally as I possibly could because I was curious about what was on the other side of that.” Citing the poem at the end of first single ‘Already Gone’ as a soul baring moment she had to stand “ten toes down” on, even when it felt revealing.

On the track, she laments ‘all my scars bleed, I feel weak and ugly.’ “I don’t feel that way now but the beautiful part of all this is that it’s all fleeting, even the good stuff. It’s kind of magic when you are able to push past those emotions and capture them because I listen back now and I’m like ‘we made it!’” Upcoming single ‘Sweet’ sits at the opposite end of that spectrum, relishing in the addictive saccharine highs and crashes of living in delusion, with symptoms akin to a sugary binge. Self-produced front-to-back, it’s hypnotic and oozing – heady with the haze of ‘what if’s. “It follows Mary Jane on the record, and I wanted to put those two back to back because it’s the part of the album where I’m just falling into my vices,” she unpacks.

“Imagining a world where you weren’t difficult, I wasn’t difficult, if it actually went well. Equating that mindless delusional vibe to overdosing on all the sweets, mukbang style.” ‘Take My Eyes’ is a mournful yet hopeful respite, stripped back to just pure vocals and patient chords before strings eventually soar. “I thought it was really important to have a moment of stillness sonically on the record because that was the only thing that really saved me in terms of, not only moving on but being open to love again in all of the ways,” Orion says. The ask on this one is simple, to show her what you see through your eyes one last time. To be grateful for the smallest moments with someone, like birdwatching or a passing breeze or gazing at the stars, that we only view from the past.

Nature is a significant thread through the project, tying in everything from Orion’s own name to image-making lyrics about the moon and sun, flowers, astronomy, landscapes and the wildlife within them. Orion admits to a work-in-progress theory that the Earth is the Garden of Eden and technology is the barrier that keeps us from fully accessing it mentally,“to the point where it’s ‘shocking’ that going for a walk is grounding,” she laughs. “I gravitate towards reminding myself and my family and friends that it starts here, it starts outside.” On the album artwork, painted by New Zealand artist Malene Reynolds Laugesen, that same belief is present: in the moon reflected in the water, the Orion constellation, the forest of hair and the booming metropolis that makes up her mind.

Like nature, it’s a piece that’s equal parts majestic and grounding, gentle and powerful. Other highlights on the project include single ‘These Days’, summarised by Orion as a ‘Stella Got Her Groove Back’ moment with inflections of vulnerability. Sonically it flows seamlessly between vignettes, the production balmy and sprawling. Her signature vocals both soothe and ache and her lyrics poetically grasp at dreamlike scenes. ‘Gannie’ is a song dedicated to her grandmother: “giving thanks and reverence to the ones before you and your family, that feels like the sun to me,” she says. It’s a reference to one of the inspirations behind her name, Nicolas Poussin’s painting ‘Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun’ in which the blind giant is on a journey to seek out the one thing that can restore his vision, the sun.

“This has been a journey,” she admits. “In order to see the light and be the light, you have to sit in the darkness for longer than might be comfortable for you. You gain a lot of insight. So I kind of took that vibe and put it sonically in the album too.” The tracklist flows from a dark, brooding place and ends with a lightness on what she describes as “the brightest song.” Her barometer for when a track or project feels done is when that catharsis is complete follows that same rhythm: “when it just heals something in me and I’m able to not think about anything and I can just feel.”

The idea that it might do the same and provide that comfort for someone else is all she could ask for. At its core, Orion is a heart split open, examined and mended; moulded into something new. And as it washes over you, there’s a sense that it’s not only fuelled by but infused with love in all its forms – for self, for others, for the world around us – crafted by an artist who has met and knows herself on a deeper level than we’ve seen yet. “Personally, I [still] think love is the best thing that I have done in my life,” Orion beams. “It’s one of those things that I’m never tired of exploring. It seems endless in terms of things that I learn, how they can be applied. Even outside of romantic love… I get close to some answer to some question that I don’t even know yet, every time I release art about love, talk about love or share and show love.”