Maki Is Growing Up—And So Is His Music

A new weight

Maki is all grown up. Or at least, he’s learning to be.

For the longest time, he was the boy-next-door—the human equivalent of golden hour, warm and radiant, a soundtrack to late afternoon bike rides and slow-burning crushes.

But now? Now, Maki is an artist on a mission, standing at the crossroads of youthful nostalgia and ambitious reinvention.

You can hear it in his music. The Filipino alternative and city-pop singer-songwriter has always had an ear for emotion, a way of distilling heartache and hope into three-minute melodies.

But lately, there’s something different. A weight. A quiet urgency.

It’s almost self-effacing, how casually he frames it. As if he isn’t part of a new generation of Filipino artists redefining what Original Pilipino Music (OPM) can be.

As if his songs aren’t already slipping into people’s memories, soundtracking first heartbreaks, first jobs, and first moments of becoming.

A feeling-first artist

But Maki has never been one for over-intellectualizing. He’s more of a feeling guy, instinct-first, letting music take shape the way emotions do—sudden, sprawling, and sometimes unexplainable.

His creative process is part ritual, part gut instinct. The only constant? His wired earphones.

“Even if they’re not plugged in, I need them there,” he admits, laughing at his own superstitions.

He’s been this way since childhood, collecting cheap, colorful earphones from the market, breaking them, keeping them anyway.

His inspirations are as sprawling as his sound—Mariah Carey and The Carpenters for ballads, Michael Bublé for jazz, Justin Bieber for pop, a good dose of K-pop, indie acts like NIKI and wave to earth.

He is a collector of sounds, assembling them into something distinctly his own.

And yet, even with the weight of growing expectations, he refuses to let pressure get to him.

“I don’t want to feel pressured right now, but at the same time, I’m trying to turn my anxiety into excitement.” It’s the kind of sentiment that feels inherently Gen Z—self-aware but hopeful, determined to reclaim the narrative from stress and imposter syndrome.

More than just a musician

Maki dreams big, but he dreams quietly.

Thirty years from now, he wants his songs to be the ones people return to when they’re reminiscing about their youth.

It’s a beautiful goal, one that understands music’s true purpose: to capture time, to bottle up emotions so that years later, someone can open the cap and feel everything all over again.

But Maki isn’t just a musician. He’s a visual artist. A former varsity athlete.

A kid who grew up thrift shopping with his family, piecing together outfits that felt right, long before he knew that fashion, like music, could be a language of its own.

Today, his style pulls from Japanese street fashion, a mix of thrifted chaos and intentional storytelling.

“I want people to see me as someone consistent when it comes to self-expression,” he says. “Because I’m a visual artist too. And I love expressing myself through fashion.”

He is, in every way, an artist in transition.

No longer just the sun-kissed boy-next-door, but not yet fully arrived at whatever version of himself he’s becoming.

And maybe that’s the beauty of it. The in-between. The growing pains, the messy rooms, the wired earphones, and unfinished tattoos.

Maki is all grown up. Or at least, he’s learning to be.

Read the story in the pages of VMAN SEA 02: now available for purchase!

Photography Karl King Aguña

Art direction Summer Untalan

Fashion Corven Uy

Grooming Janica Cleto

Hair Myckee Arcano

Photography assistants Francis Calaguas, Rojan Maguyon, and Ruby Pedrogosa

Special thanks Naomi Enriquez