Jennifer Lee has been hanging out in Koreatown since she was a kid. Her family would drive up from the suburbs south of Los Angeles to eat at the restaurants or to shop at the Koreatown Plaza, a 3-story mall where the food court features dishes like kimbap and soondae.
K-Town is like its own city within the city of LA, and that's where Lee suggested meeting All Things Considered for our interview. As we walk down Western Avenue, one of the neighborhood's main thoroughfares, Lee points out a movie theater — where locals can watch mainstream films with Korean subtitles — and the soaring turquoise facade of The Wiltern, an art-deco-style theater.
"It's beautiful, it's so much a part of my childhood, like even my mom knows what The Wiltern is. She doesn't know what happens inside it (though)," she laughs.
Lee, who performs as the electronic artist TOKiMONSTA, has graced the venue's stage several times, but as she gazes at The Wiltern's ornate walls, she says playing there wasn't something she ever imagined as a child.
"When I was younger, I didn't aspire to be a musician. I think growing up in an immigrant family, there was no point in time where being a musician was laid out for me as a possibility."
That unfathomable dream has now become a career that's spanned more than 15 years. Her new album, Eternal Reverie, is her fifth full-length release. Eternal Reverie marks Lee's first album in five years, and she says she deliberately carved out time to make it. She stopped touring. And she tried to recapture her early spirit as a music maker, at a time when she was creating beats without the pressure of album sales, photo shoots and tours.
"One of my fears, once I started doing music full time, is to become resentful of music — the thing I love the most," Lee says. "I felt that feeling of discomfort sort of rising in me, this 'Oh man I got to do this or I have to do that' and not like, 'Oh, I got to make beats today. What a gift.' "
So this album, Lee says, is a celebration of the dreamer she was when she was younger. The dreamer who never imagined playing The Wiltern. The creative spirit who was so excited about what the future held and its endless possibilities.
"You know, life is hard. Life is hard for all of us. But it doesn't mean that little dreamer inside you has to go away."
Lee has had her share of life challenges over the last decade. In 2015, she was diagnosed with a rare and potentially deadly brain disease called Moyamoya. She had two back-to-back surgeries, just a week apart, in an attempt to save her life. The surgeries were successful, but they left her in severe pain — and for a time — without the ability to walk or perform basic motor functions. She couldn't speak or understand language. When people spoke, she says, it sounded like the characters on Peanuts. Beyond that, she couldn't listen to music — it sounded like metallic, crunchy noise – and she had lost the ability to compose music, too.
"It was hard. We use music as a healing tool," she says. "And at that moment, when I needed music most, I did not have the ability to tap into that. I just sat in noise and silence. I had so much recuperating I had to do."
She slowly regained the ability to understand speech. Then her vocabulary began coming back, but music still felt out of reach. Slowly and gradually, she started to hear melodies again — "flowers appearing in a dead field" and the crunchy sounds she'd been hearing softened into something more musical.
Eventually, she tried opening her laptop again to write music. But she says nothing musical came out – everything sounded harsh and weird.
"I had to then understand that the creation of music is also a different part of my brain that had not been repaired yet," she recalls. "Music is my life. It's my career. I think being able to hear it again was great, but knowing that making it was not in the cards for me was something that was highly discouraging. So I closed my laptop, put it away and decided I will address this later."
A couple of weeks later, she picked up her laptop again. And this time, she ended up with something beautiful: a song titled, "I Wish I Could," which appeared on her 2017 album, Lune Rouge.
"My love letter to my friend"
Just up Western Avenue from The Wiltern, there's a small parking lot ringed by Korean pubs and a soft-serve ice cream shop. Tucked away in the back is a smash burger place called Love Hour, co-owned by Lee's friend Jimmy Han. "He's a tiny bit older than me, so in Korean we'd say he's kind of like 'oppa (older brother),' " she says.
They met around the time Lee's career was just getting started, and when she played Coachella in 2022, he sold a special "TOKiMONSTA meal" at the festival: a Beyond burger with American cheese, lettuce, tomato, caramelized onion and "love sauce," with a side of seasoned curly fries and kimchi cream sauce.
She says her namesake burger had sold out by the time she finished her set that day, but she's had plenty of other opportunities to eat the burgers here. "I had my birthday out on this patio," Lee says. "And I ate like three of them. I am constantly researching his burgers and eating them."
Lee's network of long-lasting friendships comes up a lot during our conversation on that patio – from Han, to the college friend who introduced her to the beatmaking scene in LA.
But it's another friend, Regina Biondo, who is at the center of the story of her new album, Eternal Reverie.
Lee describes Biondo as more than a close friend – more like a sister, she says. Biondo designed Lee's website, managed some of her tours, and influenced TOKiMONSTA's music, too. Lee recalls the time she played a festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and as they explored the city, Biondo pointed out a guy selling records on the street. One of those records eventually became the vocal sample on the Eternal Reverie track "Corazón / Death By Disco Pt 2."
As Lee was finishing work on the album last year, Biondo learned she had cancer. Then, just months before Lee's album release and scheduled tour, Biondo's cancer worsened and she was admitted to the hospital. Lee canceled the album release and the tour, to be at Biondo's side during her final days in hospice, writing to her fans: "What I'm dealing with right now feels more emotionally taxing and difficult than anything I've faced before, even more so than my journey through Moyamoya brain surgery."
Biondo died in October, at 42, and Lee says she's still very much grieving her friend's death as she launches this album – an album that's infused with Biondo's influence. Lee points to the track "For You."
"I feel like 'For You' is the epitome of what Regina loved in my music," Lee says. "That's the one where I was like, 'This is my love letter to my friend.' And it's been really difficult to go through this release process because I do have to talk about her a lot."
At one point, Lee considered not releasing the album at all, as it was a reminder of a painful year in her life. But Lee says she hopes putting it out into the world will be a journey through grief, learning and self-awareness. And though talking about Biondo has been tougher than she imagined, it's also a way to honor her and share how special she was.
"It's a part of the story of this album and it really sucks to talk about someone that you've lost," Lee says. "And it's also important, because everyone suffers in different ways, but we need to see examples of more people suffering and blossoming."
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