At Head in the Clouds Jakarta in December 2022, Baila Fauri, Christy Gardena and Shazfa ‘Shaz’ Adesya met for the first time.
Head in the Clouds was 88rising’s festival. The US-based music and media company, which initially catered to Asian and Asian American artists, had approached each of them about joining a global girl group. Los Angeles was already part of the offer.
At first, they did not even know whether the project manager who contacted them really worked for 88rising, they later told Billboard. Esther Geraldine joined about six months later, completing a group that still had no public release.
Once the four were together, they spent the following year in Jakarta, taking vocal and dance classes nearly every day and trying to find a sound they could share. Christy had come from dance. “I started singing from zero,” she later told NME. Baila, who had pursued solo music, had to learn what it meant to perform as one of four.
In 2024, they moved to Los Angeles to begin recording. Christy, who was originally from Lombok, had never been outside Indonesia before. No Na released shoot the following May and made their live debut that month at Head in the Clouds near Los Angeles. It was the American edition of the festival where three of them had first met.
Their first album, island girl, arrived in September.
Already known at home
There was a time when an Indonesian singer could leave home with an audience behind her and still have to introduce herself again abroad.
By 1994, then-Indonesian Anggun C. Sasmi had already become a star while still in her teens, with an audience stretching into other parts of Southeast Asia. “Producers won’t come to Indonesia to look for talent when there is so much available in their own countries. I had to go there,” she told Billboard in 1998.
After a spell in London, she settled in Paris, learnt French and began working with producer Erick Benzi. La Neige au Sahara broke through in France in 1997. Snow on the Sahara, its English version, followed as she pursued another market.
Touring brought another obstacle: repeated visa applications on her Indonesian passport. Anggun said she asked Indonesia’s embassy in France whether it could make travelling easier. When told it could not, she became a French citizen. “I would’ve kept my citizenship if I could,” she told The Jakarta Post in 2003.
Agnes Monica made the journey later, after spending most of her life in Indonesian entertainment. She released her first album at about six, hosted children’s television and starred in the drama Pernikahan Dini as a teenager. Her 2003 album And the Story Goes marked her move into adult pop. By the time she moved to Los Angeles under the name Agnez Mo, she was known across Indonesia and Southeast Asia.
“When I first came here, people didn’t really know who I was,” she told PhotoBook Magazine in 2026.
Other Indonesian musicians found different routes abroad. White Shoes & The Couples Company, a Jakarta-based pop band, eventually signed with Chicago label Minty Fresh and played South by Southwest in 2008. Bandung’s Mocca developed audiences across Asia, with releases and shows in countries including South Korea and Thailand.
The women 88rising recruited had histories of their own. Esther had competed on Indonesian Idol and recorded Keep It Hush with Dipha Barus and Afgan. Baila had appeared on Indonesian Idol Junior before pursuing solo music. Christy had won dance competitions with her school crew in Lombok; Shaz had performed with a dance troupe while studying in Australia.
No Na never had to become famous twice.
Finding their sound
By the time Rich Brian began working with 88rising, Dat $tick had already gone viral on YouTube.
NIKI was already making her own music and opened for Taylor Swift in Jakarta in 2014. Stephanie Poetri joined 88rising after I Love You 3000, a cheeky love song with a nod to Iron Man in Avengers: Endgame, had travelled far beyond Indonesia.
With No Na, however, the company entered before there was a group release to respond to. Its own biography describes them as the first global girl group it has “formed and produced.”
Before settling on “island girl,” the group tried different sounds and tested how they looked in a series of photoshoots. Esther later described the choice and the back-and-forth with 88rising: “We say ‘island’, they say ‘yes’.”
A week before the album, No Na released speaker freaker (the long song), a film shot across Jakarta and Yogyakarta. Eight songs run through a road trip whose scenery keeps shifting between cities, coastlines and other parts of Indonesia. On honk!, the reference to home is much smaller: an angkot horn sounds at the start of the track.
Stephanie Poetri, who worked on the song, told Medcom that early plans for No Na leaned toward 1980s pop that could reach listeners in Indonesia and America.
While talking with fellow writer PIAO about having to walk in the heat, she joked about taking an angkot, then imagined a large car that could pick everyone up. The reference made it into the track, and Poetri said the members later adjusted details to reflect their own experiences. All four are among the song’s credited writers.
The album keeps returning to Indonesia. party in the +62 uses the country’s calling code; the title track slips into santai di pantai. On work, it is heard in the metallic sound of Balinese ceng-ceng. Baila singled out nick of time for another reason: she said it captured the friendship among the four. That friendship began during their training in Jakarta and continued after they moved to Los Angeles.
What changed in Los Angeles
After the move, Esther said “a lot of doors started opening.”
In Los Angeles, where 88rising is based, the group met producers and songwriters they had not worked with before and began to learn more about the business behind their recordings. Their debut single, shoot, credits 9AM and The Stereotypes, whose work includes songs for Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars and Chris Brown. Kuk Harrell handled vocal production and recording.
Dr. Sorush Sepehr from University of Technology Sydney and Adis Maulidina have studied Jakarta as a listening market, where activity on digital platforms can help music gain momentum and travel elsewhere. Their paper did not follow No Na.
Asked about the group’s move, Sepehr pointed to the industry’s wider geography.
“Cities like Jakarta are increasingly important in shaping global music trends and helping artists gain visibility, yet much of the industry’s infrastructure, investment, and decision-making power remains concentrated in centres such as Los Angeles and London,” Sepehr told Migrant Times.
“In this sense, Jakarta creates significant value for the global music ecosystem, but does not always capture that value for itself.”
Sepehr was describing Jakarta’s role in helping music find listeners. For No Na, Jakarta was also where 88rising put the group together. The members spent a year training there before moving to the city where the company was based.
A different arrangement took shape in Jakarta this June. Sun Eater Group, whose artists have included Hindia, .Feast and Reality Club, launched LUNAR with Sony Music Indonesia. Sun Eater brought its artist-development operation into the venture; Sony brought global distribution and marketing reach.
88rising did not respond to Migrant Times’ requests for comment.
88rising’s festival circuit had also taken No Na beyond California. They played Head in the Clouds in Japan in March 2026.
A concert of their own
Baila later recalled that their families had come to watch No Na’s first performance in California. Offstage, the four were building a life together in LA. They shared a home and watched Indonesian sinetron in their free time; Baila missed ketoprak, while Shaz missed cilok and the heat of Indonesian chilli.
Seven months after that California debut, No Na performed at Spotify Wrapped Live in West Jakarta. Baila said the group was nervous. Esther was looking forward to meeting the Indonesian fans who had been waiting for them. They began sad face :( on a raised platform that descended toward the main stage. When they moved into shoot, people in the audience sang along.
In January, they appeared at the Mobile Legends M7 final in Senayan. No Na performed shoot and their new single work, then joined Stephanie Poetri for sizzle, the tournament’s theme song. They had now performed at home twice, each time as part of an event with a larger bill.
By their first anniversary in May, Baila was speaking about a tour and a big concert in Indonesia. Their overseas crowds, meanwhile, had begun to include a more visible piece of home. That August, at Head in the Clouds in California, Esther noticed more Indonesians in the audience than the year before. She saw Indonesian flags and heard more people singing the group’s songs.
The album brought them back to Jakarta in September. At the island girl pop-up in Blok M, flowers and yellow palm fronds dressed the entrance like a hajatan. On the second day, the four appeared above fans gathered in the garden below and led a singalong of party in the +62, honk! and rollerblade.
Asked by 1883 about their dream concert, all four chose Indonesia. They said they wanted time to make it “really big and intentional.”
“We want a homecoming one. We’ve never had a concert there.”
