“This android is a metaphor for myself because I’m sometimes unable to express my feelings,” Zhang Yichi, the mastermind behind BowAsWell, tells Apple Music. Neon Donuts tells a sci-fi story of a shipwrecked person losing all his memories when he’s engineered into an android, then trying to search for meaning in a strange world. This is a metaphor for Zhang as a displaced, bicultural individual who grew up in the historic city of Mainz, Germany until eight and later moved to China. “The way I think and express has a lot to do with my childhood in Germany. I’m not good at expressing myself, and I sometimes even find my mindset rigid,” he says. The concept of a “neon donut” reflects this duality between the familiar and the uncanny. “It’s that thing on the album cover. The donut is just the donut we eat. But you don’t see neon colours in donuts. I juxtapose the two utterly different concepts into a donut,” he says. The album features an android with human emotions and desires and genre mash-ups of soul, funk and neo-psychedelia. Even Zhang’s commute across Beijing provides sci-fi inspiration: “I drive over the CBD every time I go home [from my suburban studio], and it gave me a kind of cyberpunk feeling seeing the landscape quickly changing.” “Moma” opens with the genesis of androids. As the album unfolds, “I try to reveal a new layer of feelings with each track progressing, leading to a warmer reclamation in the end,” says Zhang. As the cyborg moves in limbo, it feels resentment, and “Blame Again” reveals that angst and sadness. It whirrs with yearning of its past life in “Caught Your Way”. Finally, “Headed for the Dawn” brings relief. Lyrics are also part of how BowAsWell creates a supernatural vibe. Zhang chose to sing in English to build up aesthetic distance. “To sing in a second language allows me to convey ambiguity and obscurity without fear. It’s abstract, and it’s not too blunt, I won’t feel like I’m exposing myself. Plus, when you sound like a foreign band, fans expect you to sound distant. A certain degree of distance can be our appeal,” he says. Mastered by Jake Viator from legendary Stones Throw Studios, Neon Donuts is written and recorded by Zhang, with session musicians such as drummer Gao Yuyang, guitarist Dong Shifei and bassist Liu Zifeng adding flavours.