Open Hearts

After a three-year hiatus and a single later, singer Shea Ng is sticking to what he does best sonically thoughtfulness and honesty.

- Bryan Goh

Interestingly, it is quite tough to find any information about Shea Ng — an anomaly compared to his contemporaries. Even more interesting would be how he seems to have a different “vibe” from them. His personal Instagram is private (his musician account @sheamisenmusic is public), he seems to rarely give interviews and frankly, he does not seem bothered by the “fame game” — so much that he took a three-year hiatus after his critically-acclaimed debut single “Ivory Fields” exploded on the internet.

“Lights of the Fireplace” — Ng’s single that dropped in May this year — feels like closure for him, akin to the final stage of the Kubler-Ross Model of five stages of grief. If “Ivory Fields” (With the things we’ve seen, o what could this have been) felt like shock and denial about a relationship lost and “Smoke” (But you lit the cigarette, I watched you fly free, As you rose up in smoke) was about pain and guilt, then “Lights of the Fireplace” would be about acceptance and hope — a tabula rasa for Ng to explore a new frontier of sounds.