Byron Nicholai - "Tengauryugtua (I Want To Fly)" from the 2022 album Ayagnera (The Beginning) on Tuallu Entertainment.

Back in 2014, a young Byron Nicholai went viral when he began posting videos of himself singing in the Indigenous Yup'ik language on Facebook. The media even dubbed him the "Justin Bieber of Alaska." 

Since then, he's relocated from the coastal town of Toksook Bay to Anchorage, to "get faster internet," he confessed to KYUK. “I feel like it would mess with my momentum a little bit, 'cause sometimes I’d be excited to work on a track, but then having internet problems would just kind of wash that away.”

The move worked, because now, almost ten years later, he's returned with a new album, titled Ayagnera [The Beginning], a collection of rap, R&B, and dance songs, all sung in Yugtun, the Indigenous language he grew up speaking.

“I came up with the title Ayagnera [The Beginning] because I felt like it was the start of Yup’ik modern music," he told Rolling Stone India. "There’s currently no other Yup’ik music that is released like this other than what I’ve put out.” 

Read the full story at KEXP.org