By: Alec Sharpe
The talking stage has been written about a thousand ways. Nobody thought to write it as a plate of doubles with a touch of pepper. On “TAKE A BITE,” released July 17th, Megan Soo builds an entire flirtation out of the food she grew up on: Julie mangoes, roti, and buss-up shot, doubles ordered exactly the way she likes them, and turns a Caribbean lunch order into a charming double entendre in soca right now. It works because it is not a gimmick. Every reference is a real memory, and anyone from Trinidad immediately hears the wink.
That specificity is the whole point. While plenty of artists reach for the same borrowed island signifiers, Soo is pulling from a childhood pantry, and the result is a song that could not have been written by anyone else. She is Trinidadian and Chinese, born in Toronto, raised in Trinidad, now living in Los Angeles, and “TAKE A BITE” is the first record where all of those pieces sit in one place without competing. The soca is not a seasoning on top of a pop song. The pop is not a concession to make the soca palatable. The two are load-bearing, and afrobeats and island rhythms move underneath both.
“Honestly, ‘TAKE A BITE’ is so special to me because it’s the first single where I feel like I’ve officially found my sound,” Soo says. That is a significant thing for an artist to say out loud, and the record backs it up. There is a version of this song that plays it safe and lands as pleasant. This one is spicy, fast, and completely uninterested in being polite about what it is describing.
Chasing The Carnival Feeling
The origin story explains the tempo. Soo came off Trinidad Carnival on a high and went almost directly into the studio, chasing a feeling before it could fade. What she was after was not the costumes or the color, though both are part of the track’s DNA. It was the road.
“At Carnival, you’re literally dancing with complete strangers, but everyone instantly feels like family because you’re all just there celebrating the culture together,” she says. “There’s this super fun, playful vibe in those quick little moments where you cross paths and dance with someone for just a second before moving on in the crowd.”
That is the exact emotional register of “TAKE A BITE,” the passing connection, the flirtation with a stranger that lasts eight bars and does not need to last longer. Great songs flow, and this one clearly did. Soo was not constructing a concept in a whiteboard session. She was bottling something she had just lived, and the urgency is audible.
Taking Soca Across On Her Own Terms
She is doing it independently. No label, no machine, no A&R sanding down the specificity into something more exportable, which matters given her stated mission is to take soca to the world by fusing it with pop, afrobeats, and island rhythms. That mission has a long and largely unfinished history behind it. Soca has crossed over in flashes, usually when a producer from outside the culture borrows the rhythm for a season. What has been rarer is someone from inside the culture doing the crossing themselves, on their own terms, with the food references left in rather than smoothed out. That is the harder version of the job, and it is the one Soo has taken on.
She has already been on the road. Soo toured on Boys Of Summer, and the live experience shows in how “TAKE A BITE” is built, and this is a song constructed by someone who knows what a crowd does with a drop, not someone imagining it from behind a laptop.
The Artist Megan Soo Moves Between
The company she keeps sonically makes the ambition legible. Soo’s music sits comfortably alongside Kes The Band, Machel Montano, Patrice Roberts, Nailah Blackman, and Naika, the artists who have carried soca’s modern era, while the pop and afrobeats side of her sound puts her in conversation with Tyla and Major Lazer. Those are also, not coincidentally, the rooms she wants to be in. She names Kes, Machel Montano, Diplo, and Major Lazer as dream collaborators. A Kes feature over a Diplo production with Soo writing the hook would sit naturally within the range of genres she already moves between.
For now, there is “TAKE A BITE,” which does not need a co-sign to work. It is a flirty, funny, playful record from an artist who stopped trying to pick a lane and instead built one wide enough for all of her. The talking stage never sounded this hungry.
Listen to “TAKE A BITE” on Spotify and follow Megan Soo on Instagram.
