otay:onii – No Talent
Lane Shi Otay:onii opens Love Is In The Shit — due May 8 on Pelagic Records — with “No Talent”, a single that reframes the concept of talent entirely. The lyric does the heavy lifting: “I have no talent / Just a story after another story / A fool will gain some wisdom in some relics / The talent that you call / Is the long memory after all”. It’s a quiet provocation, delivered over a production that shifts between breath and structure, her voice moving from incantation to something closer to spoken philosophy.
What catches my ear is how the song earns its repetition — the refrain doesn’t feel like a hook pushed for impact, it feels like a thought being worked through in real time. The closing line, “It’s dull / But only getting more interesting from now on”, loops three times and actually lands differently each pass. Lane Shi describes the meaning behind the track: “the courage to break a certainty upon dire straits, and the determination to receive and give love after shattering to none”. She invokes the concept of Shělìzǐ — 舍利子, as an internal relic that stays even when everything else falls apart.
Otay:onii (Lane Shi) is originally from Haining, China, and her practice spans music, performance, installation, and film composition. Her previous albums — NAG (2018), MíngMíng ٥٥ (2021), Dream Hacker (2023), and True Faith Ain’t Blind (2024) — share this same refusal to settle into a genre. She’s performed at SXSW, Roadburn, CTM, and Le Guess Who?, and is a Triennium artist in residence at this year’s Roadburn Festival. She’s also a SHAPE+ Platform featured artist for 2024–25. “No Talent” is the kind of song that doesn’t try to win you over immediately — it just keeps getting more interesting, exactly as it promises.
Tracklist — Love Is In The Shit (May 8, 2026 — Pelagic Records):
- Have You Ever
- Love From Survivors
- World Class Citizen
- No Talent
- The Plaice
- Underdog Bark
- Tears Won’t Tell
