For most of a set, PRETTY HAVØC is the guy stage left, playing guitar and singing harmonies behind someone else's name in lights. Then, for roughly three and a half minutes in the middle of the show, the lights find him instead. That is the arrangement he has built his career on: a producer and sideman role that keeps opening just enough space for his own project to step through.
Born Tyler Thang in Singapore and raised across Boston and Busan before settling in Los Angeles at the end of 2018, he has spent seven years building two careers that only recently converged. One is PRETTY HAVØC, a solo pop-punk and alt-rock project laced with Korean R&B, built on a stated mission to put an Asian face on a genre he grew up watching almost exclusively white men perform. The other is a working, credited role inside the orbit of Dutch Melrose and MADKID Records, first as a producer, then as a touring guitarist, and finally, this year, as a co-billed artist in his own right.
The Producer Credit That Opened the Door
The formal entry point was quiet. On February 7, 2025, Dutch Melrose released "FORGET YOU" credited on Genius and Apple Music as "produced by Dutch Melrose & PRETTY HAVØC." There was no accompanying rollout announcing a new signing, no press cycle. It was simply a production credit, the kind his Cal State LA profile had already flagged months earlier when it described him plainly as a "songwriter, producer, and audio engineer," a skill set sharpened during an internship at Robby Krieger's Horse Latitudes Studios under Grammy-nominated producer Eric Corne. That apprenticeship, more than any viral single, is the real foundation under everything that followed.
A Mission Built Into the Name
PRETTY HAVØC the solo artist predates the MADKID connection by seven years. He debuted in 2018 with "i'm sorry i broke your heart," broke through in 2019 with "goddess" at roughly 1.1 million streams, and landed his highest-profile early features in 2022: "ATOM BOMB" with Sleeping With Sirens' Kellin Quinn, which hit number 10 on Spotify's rock playlist The Locker, and "Punching Bag" with former 24K member Kim Jeong-uk, a bilingual English and Korean duet produced across a Los Angeles to Seoul workflow.
He built a solo mission around being seen, then found his loudest audience by standing next to someone else.
Underneath all of it sits a mission he states without hedging. "Growing up, it always felt like all the dudes I admired and all the posters I had in my bedroom wall, they were all these cool bands but like 99% of them, they're all white dudes," he told the Cal State LA University Times in 2025. He has also named the specific friction that comes with pushing back against that: a perception that Asian men should underplay swagger in a genre built on it. His response is forward-facing rather than bitter, framing himself as someone with "every opportunity and every chance to be the first one to change minds."
Center Stage, Briefly
That mission collided with the MADKID machine on July 23, 2025, when "MIRROR MIRROR" dropped as a full co-billed single with Dutch Melrose, expanded into a LOVERBOY EP two weeks later. By late August, PRETTY HAVØC was on a plane to Europe as Dutch Melrose's touring guitarist and backing vocalist on VOILÀ's sold-out "Magic Word" tour, playing Glasgow, Manchester, London, Paris, Antwerp, Cologne, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Berlin. Christian Gates shared those same bills as the tour's other support act, meaning PRETTY HAVØC spent weeks sharing a stage with him night after night before ever stepping into his own spotlight.
"Dutch's guitarist and backing vocalist, who also makes music under the name PRETTY HAVØC, joined him centre stage to perform MIRROR MIRROR live."HIVE Magazine, Manchester tour review
That review, from the Manchester stop, captured exactly what the arrangement is designed to do: warm a room up for someone else's headliner while planting, mid-set, a three-minute reminder that the guitarist has his own name too. It is a strange kind of visibility, borrowed and self-made at once, and it is not an accident. Roster mates like benny mayne operate under a similar hybrid structure at MADKID, where label billing and solo self-release sit side by side rather than one absorbing the other.
What Comes Next
In February 2026, the partnership extended past the stage: his cover of The Script's "THE MAN WHO CAN'T BE MOVED" shipped with a visualizer filmed personally by Dutch Melrose, one collaborator returning a favor to another. It is a small credit, but it tracks the shape of the whole career so far, one where the biggest opportunities arrive sideways, through someone else's session, someone else's tour bus, someone else's camera. PRETTY HAVØC keeps taking them anyway, and keeps finding, for a few minutes at a time, the spotlight he set out to earn on his own terms.