Wallice

Wallice, born Wallice Hana Watanabe on April 3, 1998, is a Los Angeles-raised singer-songwriter, guitarist and former child actress whose 2020 bedroom recording "Punching Bag" and its 2021 follow-up "23" carried her from SoundCloud obscurity to a Dirty Hit record deal, arena support slots with The 1975, and a debut album, The Jester, released in November 2024.

Early Life and Identity

Wallice grew up in Topanga, California, a canyon community in the Santa Monica Mountains that she has called a "hippie mountain." She is half Japanese and half white: her mother, an American, lived in Japan in her twenties and learned the language there, while her father was born and raised in Tokyo until age 27, the two meeting after he moved to the United States. Japanese food and language were part of her upbringing, even though she has visited Japan only a handful of times and has met her paternal relatives once, at her grandfather’s funeral.

Her first name is itself a piece of family lore. She was meant to be named after Wallis Simpson, the American socialite for whom England’s King Edward VIII abdicated the throne, but a spelling mix-up on her birth certificate, between "Wallace" and "Wallis," produced the invented spelling "Wallice." Her middle name, Hana, has a nearly identical origin story: she grew up believing it meant "flower" in Japanese, only to learn later that her father had actually intended it as a reference to a Rolling Stones song. She went by Hana through childhood because classmates mocked "Wallice" as a boy’s name.

Child Actress to Classical Musician

Before music, Wallice had a brief career as a child actress. At age four she appeared in "We Two Kings," a Christmas-themed episode of the NBC sitcom Frasier, and did a couple of commercials that never developed into a sustained acting career.

Her musical foundation, by contrast, is classical and technical rather than casual. She began on recorder and trumpet in public elementary school, took up cello at age nine and played it for a decade, and picked up classical guitar in high school, which became her primary instrument. After attending a performing-arts high school, she enrolled at The New School in New York City to major in jazz performance and voice. She has said she never intended to become a jazz singer specifically; rather, she viewed jazz’s demanding technical vocabulary as a way to become a well-rounded vocalist capable of moving through "almost any genre" afterward. After one year in New York, homesickness, distance from her Los Angeles-based creative partner, and the cost of the program led her to withdraw and move home to pursue music full time, a decision she memorialized in her breakout single "23," in which she calls herself a "jazz school dropout," a tag she has continued to use about herself in press ever since, including a 2023 Rolling Stone Australia profile titled "Wallice on Going From ‘Jazz School Dropout’ to Supporting The 1975."

Beyond music, Wallice is also a working ceramicist. Her mother kept a kiln in their Topanga garage, and Wallice expanded the hobby during pandemic lockdown, eventually selling mugs, plates and other pieces through her own site and an Instagram account, @walliceceramics.

The Breakthrough: "Punching Bag" and "23"

Wallice’s recorded history predates her viral moment: an early single, "Nyc," came out in 2017, followed by "Rx" in January 2018 and a debut EP, Big Sugar, in September 2018, all lo-fi indie-pop work she has since delisted from streaming. That early material was heavily indebted to Lana Del Rey and Lorde and lived mostly on SoundCloud for a small, devoted audience that included her mother.

The real inflection point came in October 2020 with "Punching Bag," a lo-fi, organ-drenched track about an unrequited friendship, recorded in the bedroom of her childhood friend and future full-time producer, Marinelli. The single picked up early tastemaker support, including Zane Lowe airplay on Apple Music 1 and Steve Lamacq spins on BBC Radio 6 Music, and, crucially, a placement on Spotify’s influential breaking-artist playlist "Lorem," which dramatically expanded its reach. Wikipedia cites an early benchmark of roughly four million streams off that placement; by mid-2023 the track had surpassed nine million Spotify streams. The song’s momentum was amplified further by TikTok, where "Punching Bag" became a recurring soundtrack choice as part of the broader wave of 2020-era bedroom-pop tracks that found second lives as viral audio.

Off the back of that single, Wallice was tapped for Spotify’s Fresh Finds artist-development program, through which she and Marinelli collaborated with veteran producer Ariel Rechtshaid, known for his work with Haim, Vampire Weekend and Adele, on the Spotify-exclusive track "Nothing Scares Me," released June 23, 2021.

Riding that wave, Wallice followed with "23" in February 2021, a tongue-in-cheek centerpiece chronicling her post-jazz-school ennui and quarter-life anxiety, which became and remains her signature and most-streamed original song, reaching roughly 12 million Spotify streams by 2023. Between the two singles, Wallice went from a home-recording unknown to a Dirty Hit signee playing sold-out headline shows within roughly a year, a compressed timeline she has described as overwhelming: "I feel like they wouldn’t even fill a room, but then my managers are like, ‘It literally would fill this venue,’" she told The Forty-Five.

Discography: EPs and the Debut Album

Wallice’s catalog since 2020 unfolds as a tight sequence of singles, three core EPs and one full-length debut, all developed in close partnership with Marinelli.

Off the Rails (June 4, 2021) was her proper debut EP, gathering "Punching Bag," "23," "Hey Michael," the title track and "Wisdom Tooth" into a six-song statement about growing up in your early twenties. "Hey Michael" is a revenge anthem for anyone who has encountered a gaslighting, manipulative person, and features Marinelli directly on the track. "Wisdom Tooth" fuses the mundane trauma of a dental extraction with a breakup narrative, reportedly written the day before Wallice’s own wisdom teeth were removed. This EP is the release her Dirty Hit signing rests on.

90s American Superstar (May 6, 2022) was her first release built for Dirty Hit and marked a deliberate turn toward grungier, more electrified alternative rock, framed around a fictional, over-the-hill 1990s celebrity persona. Reviewers highlighted the title track’s anthemic, fuzzed-out pop-rock ("Stop being so damn dramatic / You just got dropped from Atlantic"), the synth-warped "Little League," the punkish Caroline Rose-indebted satire of "Rich Wallace," the frenzied guitar solo on "John Wayne," and the surreal, crowd-chanted closer "Funeral." The same year, a standalone single, "Japan," departed from the EP’s scuzzy energy for a delicate, Laurel Canyon-indebted acoustic meditation on her father’s homeland and her complicated relationship to a "hometown [that] has never felt like home," released alongside a Japanese-language version. Also in 2022, Wallice contributed "Mean Girl" to See You Next Year, the inaugural Mike Dean-assisted compilation from Pigeons & Planes.

Mr. Big Shot (2023) was announced with lead single "Best Friend" on April 4, 2023, amid a touring stretch that included dates with JAWNY and The 1975. Its six tracks, "Best Friend," "Loser At Best," "Quarterlife," "Prepaid Wireless," "Why Do You Love Me?" and "Disappear," continued her coming-of-age lyrical throughline while marking, by her own account, the first time she meaningfully collaborated with producers beyond Marinelli.

The Jester (November 15, 2024) is Wallice’s debut studio album, a 14-track, 46-minute record announced in August 2024 with the double-single release of "Heaven Has To Happen" and "The Opener," followed by "Gut Punch Love," "Deadbeat" and "I Want You Yesterday" as further pre-release singles. The final tracklist runs "The Opener," "Gut Punch Love," "Look At Me," "I Want You Yesterday," "Hurry Babe," "Clown Like Me" (featuring Albert Hammond Jr.), "The Hardest Working Man Alive," "Manipulate," "Boring," "Sickness," "Deadbeat," "Flash In The Pan," "Heaven Has To Happen" and "Curtains To Close." Conceptually, the album uses the metaphor of a medieval court jester, someone paid to entertain "for the royalty’s enjoyment," not because they’re beloved, to process Wallice’s imposter syndrome and the psychic toll of performing for indifferent arena crowds while opening for The 1975. The seed of the concept traces to an April 1, 2022 writing session with Marinelli and Ethan Gruska, where Wallice first articulated the idea of masking what’s inside for the sake of entertainment, which became "Heaven Has to Happen."

Sonic Identity and Influences

Across outlets, Wallice’s sound is described with a cluster of overlapping labels: indie pop, indie rock, alt-pop, alternative rock, bedroom pop and shoegaze-inflected rock, often within the same piece. AllMusic’s capsule summary calls her music "tuneful indie pop with a jagged alt-rock edge," tracing a trajectory from poppier beginnings toward that jagged edge as her Dirty Hit-era EPs progressed.

Wallice has offered one of the more vivid self-descriptions in print: "A modern version of ‘90s Weezer, but if Rivers Cuomo was a girl and was heavily influenced by Lana Del Rey." She names Weezer and MGMT as her two biggest single influences, with a broader constant rotation of Radiohead, Big Thief, Phoebe Bridgers, Lana Del Rey, Mitski, Japanese Breakfast, Dr. Dog, No Doubt and Coldplay, alongside a formative pre-teen phase of Black Eyed Peas, Blink-182 and Gwen Stefani. While writing 90s American Superstar, she and Marinelli were leaning specifically on The Strokes and 1990s alternative rock.

Wallice frames her classical and jazz training not as the source of her sound but as its technical scaffolding, calling the alt-pop hybrid "a nice amalgamation" of a disciplined classical and jazz foundation and a lifelong diet of 90s and 2000s alt-rock radio consumed as a teenager. She has also noted that her touring band is composed entirely of trained jazz musicians, including a tour manager with a master’s degree in jazz performance, joking that "we’re all jazz bros."

Lyrically, her music is defined by sharp, self-deprecating, pop-culture-literate wit applied to the anxieties of early adulthood: Gen Z ennui, imposter syndrome, toxic relationships, family history and mixed-race identity, often delivered with a knowingly theatrical edge, as on "90s American Superstar" and The Jester’s clown-based conceit. A 2026 concert preview in the Georgetown Independent summarized The Jester’s palette as "90s grungy rock mixed with bedroom pop," combined with her "airy vocals and poignant drumline."

Streaming and Chart Performance

Wallice has not achieved mainstream Billboard chart placements; her commercial footprint is measured through streaming metrics and playlist milestones rather than traditional charts. "Punching Bag" reached roughly four million Spotify streams shortly after its "Lorem" playlist placement and had surpassed nine million by mid-2023. "23" is her most-cited streaming success, reaching roughly 12 million Spotify streams by spring 2023 and continuing to climb. As of an August 2025 snapshot, third-party analytics service Music Metrics Vault recorded Wallice at approximately 187,882 monthly Spotify listeners and roughly 68.6 million total career streams, with her top track alone accounting for over 18.3 million plays. These figures are directional estimates from a third-party aggregator rather than label-confirmed data. Individual The Jester tracks show more modest early per-song counts, reflecting the front-loaded nature of her streaming base relative to her two breakout singles. Beyond streaming, Wallice’s most tangible chart-adjacent milestone is her inclusion on Pigeons & Planes’ 2022 See You Next Year compilation and repeated recognition on curated breaking-artist and ones-to-watch lists.

Touring History

Wallice’s live career has been built almost entirely as a support act for larger indie and pop-rock acts, punctuated by her own headline runs. In 2021 she opened for Chloe Moriondo. In early 2022 she opened for Still Woozy on the "If This Isn’t Nice, I Don’t Know What Is" tour, including a February 22, 2022 date at First Avenue in Minneapolis, her first substantial national tour, which she has said left her wrestling with the "novel notion" of performing every night regardless of mood. She also played the Moroccan Lounge in Los Angeles and the 2022 All Things Go Festival, and has been cited as having supported Wallows during this general period.

In early-to-mid 2023 she toured the U.S. as direct support for JAWNY, wrapping in late March with a New York date. Immediately after, in April 2023, Wallice was announced as main support for The 1975 on the Asia-Pacific and Australia-Aotearoa leg of their "At Their Very Best" tour, playing arenas of 10,000-plus capacity in Manila, Australia and New Zealand, the first arena dates of her career. She has said she found out via a phone call from her manager that reduced her to tears. That experience directly inspired "The Opener," the six-minute lead track of The Jester.

From January through April 2025 she headlined her own 20-date North American tour behind The Jester, kicking off January 25 in San Diego and running through Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and Los Angeles again, before an April leg through the South and East Coast. A February 2025 review of her Chicago stop highlighted a setlist spanning her entire catalog, "Punching Bag," "23," "Off the Rails," "Best Friend" and "Flash In The Pan" (the latter featuring a live trumpet player), underscoring how her back catalog remains central to her live show even post-album. Per her Wasserman Music booking bio, captured in September 2025, she was slated to open for St. Vincent. Her own headline dates continued into spring 2026, including an April 15, 2026 stop at The Atlantis in Washington, D.C., described in local press as effectively her first true solo-scale headlining tour, with the same core catalog, The Jester highlights alongside "90s American Superstar," still anchoring her live sets.

Collaborators

Marinelli (David Marinelli) is by far Wallice’s most important and consistent collaborator: her producer, co-writer, sometime touring drummer and closest friend, credited on essentially every song she has released for roughly a decade. The two met in middle school around age 11, in band and orchestra class, where Marinelli’s mother was sometimes Wallice’s substitute teacher, but didn’t begin writing together until around age 17. "Punching Bag" was recorded in his bedroom, and Marinelli maintains his own production career beyond Wallice’s catalog, including sessions at London’s 38East Studios.

Other key collaborators, concentrated around the The Jester era, include Ariel Rechtshaid, the noted producer behind Haim, Adele and Vampire Weekend, who worked on "Nothing Scares Me"; Ethan Gruska, who co-wrote the earliest sketch of "Heaven Has to Happen"; Mikey Freedom Hart, brought in to co-executive produce The Jester alongside Marinelli, whose prior credits include Blood Orange, Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Jon Batiste, with sessions running 14-hour days in his New York studio, including one at the storied Electric Lady Studios; Albert Hammond Jr. of The Strokes, credited with featured rhythm guitar on "Clown Like Me"; Sam Evian, who worked on "Flash in the Pan"; Charlie Martin of Hovvdy, who collaborated on "Hurry Babe"; Mike Dean, who assisted the 2022 See You Next Year compilation to which Wallice contributed; and Vanessa Pla, an indie music videographer enlisted to realize the clown-core visual world of The Jester’s campaign.

Label, Team and the Dirty Hit Split

Wallice signed to Dirty Hit, the British independent label founded by Jamie Oborne and best known as the home of The 1975, in 2021, shortly after "Punching Bag" broke through. She has described the decision as an easy one after meeting the label’s A&R team, recalling that an A&R rep named Max "said the exact thing I wanted to hear." Her label roster-mates included The 1975, Wolf Alice, beabadoobee, Rina Sawayama and Oscar Lang, and she has cited fellow Dirty Hit artist Rina Sawayama, also of Japanese heritage, as a personal inspiration, saying "she’s also a Japanese artist and her visuals are insane. She’s very inspirational to what I do." All three of her EPs following her signing and her debut album The Jester were released via Dirty Hit. For touring, she has been represented by Tom Windish at Wasserman Music, covering North America, South America and Africa.

In October 2025, Wallice stated via an Instagram Story that Dirty Hit had dropped her from the label, with the post implying the decision was tied to the commercial reception of The Jester. This places her, as of this writing, in a post-major-indie-label phase of her career. There is no confirmed report of a new Wallice single, EP or album released following her departure; her most recent official studio release remains The Jester, and her spring 2026 touring continues to lean on that catalog.

Scene and Connections

Wallice sits inside a dense web of 2020s coastal indie and alt-pop artists. Her most concrete cross-pollination runs through her Dirty Hit labelmates (The 1975, Wolf Alice, beabadoobee, Rina Sawayama, Oscar Lang), her tourmates (Still Woozy, JAWNY, Chloe Moriondo, Wallows, The 1975), and her session collaborators who circulate through the broader LA and New York indie-pop production world. Del Water Gap occupies an adjacent lane of literate, hook-driven alt-pop and indie rock out of the New York-adjacent singer-songwriter scene, touring festivals and support circuits that overlap with Wallice’s own (Del Water Gap has played Lollapalooza and opened for Niall Horan and Maggie Rogers; Wallice has played All Things Go and opened for The 1975, Still Woozy and JAWNY), though the two are best understood as scene-adjacent rather than confirmed direct tourmates.

Wallice has also named contemporaries with parallel mixed-Asian-American indie identities, Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, Mitski, Joji, Luna Li and rei brown, as artists she feels a specific kinship with, curating an AAPI Heritage Month Apple Music playlist around that theme in 2022. She discovered Mitski’s "First Love / Late Spring" in high school and has said learning Mitski is also half-Japanese was formative to her own sense of representation in indie music.

Timeline

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Wallice her real name?

Yes. It is her legal first name, though it began as a typo: her parents intended "Wallis," after Wallis Simpson, or "Wallace," and the birth certificate produced the unique spelling "Wallice."

What is Wallice’s most popular song?

"23," released in February 2021, is her most-streamed original song, having reached roughly 12 million Spotify streams by 2023. Her 2020 breakout, "Punching Bag," is a close second, having surpassed nine million streams by mid-2023.

Did Wallice really go to jazz school?

Yes. She studied jazz performance and voice at The New School in New York City before withdrawing after one year, a decision she memorialized in "23," where she calls herself a "jazz school dropout."

Is Wallice still signed to Dirty Hit?

No. She announced via an Instagram Story in October 2025 that Dirty Hit had dropped her, a decision she suggested was connected to the commercial reception of her 2024 debut album, The Jester.

Who produces Wallice’s music?

Marinelli, her childhood friend since middle school, has produced and co-written essentially every Wallice song since "Punching Bag." The Jester also brought in co-producer Mikey Freedom Hart and contributions from Ariel Rechtshaid, Ethan Gruska, Sam Evian and Charlie Martin of Hovvdy.

Has Wallice charted on Billboard?

No confirmed Billboard chart placements exist for Wallice; her commercial footprint is documented through Spotify streaming metrics, playlist placements and critical "ones to watch" recognition rather than traditional chart positions.

Further Reading

Wallice’s catalog runs through Dirty Hit, the label she shared with The 1975, Wolf Alice, beabadoobee, Rina Sawayama and Oscar Lang before parting ways with the label in October 2025. Her touring history connects her to Chloe Moriondo, Still Woozy, JAWNY, Wallows and The 1975, and her scene proximity extends toward artists like Del Water Gap within the broader mid-2020s coastal indie and alt-pop landscape. Readers interested in the producers and session players around her debut album The Jester may also find relevant context in entries covering the wider LA and New York indie-pop production ecosystem on this wiki.