Katherine Li

Singer-songwriter and pop wunderkind Katherine Li was in her Toronto home mapping out the vision for her debut album when a lightning bolt hit.

Her previous songs – romantic tales of teenage angst and longing marked by equal bouts of ecstasy and heartbreak – had earned her a fervent audience but were, by her own admission, “unrequited and one-sided.” She had posted covers online while still in high school before turning to original material. (Her song “Heartache,” which the New Yorker called “an authentic moment of pure lyricism,” earned over a million views on TikTok in its first week. “It’s as though we were watching from the other side of a looking glass as a sweet, guileless girl shares what’s in her heart in the privacy of her bedroom,” the outlet wrote.)

But as an obsessive fan of rom-coms, Katherine saw in films like The Princess Diaries, She’s the Man, and To All the Boys I've Loved Before a wider spectrum of narrative structure, character development, and emotional heft that she could apply to her own art. “In every movie character [in these rom-coms], there's so many situations that they're put in where it's just so relatable,” she says, referencing characters like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Lara Jean Song-Covey. “I really wanted people to feel what I feel when I watch movies when they can see a version of themselves in these songs.”

Conceived in four acts — The Meet-Cute, The Twist, The Riot, and The Happy Ending — I Love You, or Whatever could stand proudly next to albums by Olivia Rodrigo, Gracie Abrams, and Billie Eilish. The mournful “Hate Her Enough” finds Katherine comparing herself to another woman, borne out of “a lot of late-night thoughts that always involved another person I just wanted to be like,” she says. “But also, if I hate her enough, then maybe I would like myself more.

The moody piano-driven ballad “Blend In” describes the universal feeling of “changing yourself to fit someone else's standards or like something that they want,” Katherine says, while album standout “One Foot Out” finds the singer, armed only with a guitar, exploring and confronting feelings of self-sabotage and self-doubt so many of us feel but try to hide.

“The idea of fitting in and comparing yourself to other people is what I relate to the most,” Katherine says. “In high school, I thought a lot about what people thought of me. But college helped me grow and become more confident. I go around the day now and I'm just chilling, but I like revisiting the feelings that I experienced in high school.”

The dozen songs are filled with this emotional vulnerability and fearless heart-on-sleeve songwriting that has already earned her a rabid following since she first started posting original song snippets to TikTok in 2020.

She gradually built up her own organic global community, responding to fans’ questions and laments about love and loss and acting, as a New Yorker article praising her put it, as “her fans’ relationship coach, advising them on their own heartbreaks.” “They feel like me,” she said at the time. Katherine is embracing a new paradigm: a TikTok-era musician infusing an old-school

approach to building her fanbase via listening parties, Zoom movie marathons, in-person meetups and handwritten postcards and thank-you notes to fans.

As an independent singer-songwriter, Katherine was recruited by American Eagle to have fans create music videos for her song “Happening Again.” “We were looking for someone who had an instant connection through the phone,” Craig Brommers, the company’s chief marketing officer, told the New Yorker. “Who didn’t feel manufactured. Someone who felt he or she had a personal story, whose music was real but also leaning toward optimism … Katherine was perfect for what we were looking for.” The result? 1.5 million videos submitted and 3 billion views.

She hadn’t even graduated college before numerous labels were after her, with Katherine continuing to release her confessionals independently, garnering millions of views. “Songwriting-wise, I feel a lot more vulnerable in a lot of these new songs because before, it was always the same theme and storyline: Oh, he doesn't know I exist or oh, he doesn't like me back,” she says. “But this time, it's a lot more about things that are happening in my own head, which is honestly a lot scarier to talk about.”

“Whatever Major Loser,” the oldest song on the album dating back to 2023, atypically channels the pop-punk energy of classic Avril Lavigne. But a consummate perfectionist, Katherine had a near-finished album before heading to Los Angeles to record four more songs that would eventually end up on I Love You, or Whatever. “Sometimes I come out of sessions and it's a great song, but I'm like, ‘Is this something I would write?’” she says. “[Some earlier songs] were just missing parts of me. The new songs helped things fit in correctly.”

The rom-coms helped there. Listening to I Love You, or Whatever (itself the perfect title for a film) in an era dominated by singles, you can hear both the thematic cohesion across the tracks and the influence of Katherine’s favorite films. “I just wanted to tell a story that makes sense. I was thinking, ‘What could the plot be here?’” she says. “You meet a super-awesome guy [The heartfelt “So Cliche”]. Wait, there's a problem. There's another girl. [The elegiac masterpiece “The Understudy”]. Here comes all the feelings of insecurities and comparison and jealousy. And then because it is a rom-com, we'll have a happy ending and it all gets wrapped up with the really fun love song title track.”