About
Pauline Rana is a Manila songwriter who records as The Purest Blue. The project began alone at home in pandemic isolation, took two and a half years to land its debut album, and has just shifted into something different. The new EP turns what was a one-person bedroom act into a five-piece band of friends.
The debut, All is True, came out in July 2023 on the Indonesian indie label Kolibri Rekords, with a limited cassette pressing routed through United Cassettes in the Philippines. Seven songs, twenty-one minutes, framed in her own words as a dollhouse of rooms and the people she used to be in them. Dreamy, gazey indie rock for grief, a friendly tape label called it.
The sophomore EP, You Can Be Free, arrived in late November 2025. Four songs, twelve minutes, written by Pauline and performed by a named lineup of Nica Feliciano, Kaya Katigbak, Mark Aze Deladia, Jared Lim, and Pauline herself. The EP was recorded across three small Manila studios with three different engineers, produced and mixed by Jared Lim and Mark Aze Deladia, mastered by Jared. Her own framing on the release page calls the change explicitly: a bedroom project composed over emails has become a band, with rowdy teenage songs sung into the void.
The collaborator that runs through every Purest Blue release is Jared Lim, the Singaporean producer and guitarist of Sobs and Subsonic Eye who also records as jorud. He co-produced the debut, made a single with her in July 2025 as jorud and The Purest Blue, and produced and mastered the new EP. The project sits one tier below the touring acts of the Manila and Singapore indie axis, in the same producer ecosystem, with a tight working circle and a small audience.
Highlights
- Debut album
- All is True (Jul 21 2023) on Kolibri Rekords, KOL-014, limited cassette via United Cassettes
- Sophomore EP
- You Can Be Free (Nov 28 2025), 4 songs, 12 min, project shifts from solo to band
- Lineup
- Pauline Rana, Nica Feliciano, Kaya Katigbak, Mark Aze Deladia, Jared Lim
- Recurring producer
- Jared Lim of Sobs and Subsonic Eye, also records as jorud
- Footprint
- 2.8K IG, 1,179 Spotify followers, 1,752 monthly listeners, 58 YouTube
Deeper Dive
The structural moment is the move from solo to band, and Pauline has framed it deliberately on the release page rather than letting it pass as a lineup detail. The first record was made over emails in isolation. The second was made in three Manila rooms with the friends who had started turning the songs into live arrangements. The EP title repeats as the closing line of her own blurb, You Can Be Free, an instruction the project is now in a position to give itself. The arc reads as grief in 2023, chosen family in 2025.
The cadence between releases is unusually slow for an indie songwriter at this audience size. The debut album in July 2023, a collaboration single with jorud in July 2025, a standalone single in October 2025, the EP in late November 2025. Two and a half years between full bodies of work, no content treadmill in between. That pace, the willingness to let a record sit, is part of what gives each release its weight, and it is also why the back catalogue is a small set of finished objects rather than a feed.
The distribution stack is regional rather than Western, which explains both the sound and the absence of editorial pickup. Kolibri Rekords is an Indonesian indie running cassette mail-order out of Tokopedia and direct SEA shipping. United Cassettes is the Philippines DIY tape distributor. The release notes for the debut tape ship within Indonesia and Southeast Asia first, worldwide later. A catalogue routed through this infrastructure reaches the right local listeners and is invisible to Pitchfork, Bandcamp Daily, and Resident Advisor by design.
The collaborator network is the strongest non-metric signal that the work is taken seriously inside its scene. Jared Lim has produced every Purest Blue release since the first single, in addition to playing on the EP. Mark Aze Deladia is the second producer and mixer on the new record. Kiana Carlos did the EP cover, KITA did the debut. Three engineers, three studios, a five-piece lineup, a small Indonesian label, a Philippines tape distributor. None of those people are doing this for visibility numbers, which is a different shape of professional attention than the audience metrics suggest.
In Their Words
“When a bedroom music project composed over emails finds itself taking the necessary shape for live performances, it happens that the collective influence of each friend-musician-bandmate involved implicitly changes the dynamic. The Purest Blue is now a band, with rowdy teenage songs, life-affirming, Pauline and friends singing emancipatory anthems into the void. You Can Be Free!”
“An intersection of past and present, a stray cat crossing the busy intersection, finding a way home from the busy city to the quiet of its native suburbia. This is All is True, a dollhouse of liminal spaces and transitory stages, doors hiding all the rooms we have ever been in, all the people we used to be.”