Facts and Background About Alaina

• Alaina is known for her beautiful, minimally decorated bedroom and unique fashion sense. Her visual aesthetic and great eye for style have helped her gain her legion of loyal fans, and her bedroom, which is featured in her videos, is a bit of a star in its own right. The room is primarily decorated with plants, neon signs in cursive script, and modern, minimalist furniture. Alaina covers songs in her room for her videos, setting up her microphone strategically to enhance the listening experience for viewers.
• Castillo isn’t the first or the only musician to make use of aspects of the ASMR phenomenon. However, her graceful and stylish blending of up-close, tingle-inducing sounds and bilingual pop music has helped to make her a massive sensation on YouTube, TikTok, and streaming platforms like Spotify.
• Alaina speaks both Spanish and English, sometimes choosing to sing in both languages. She told Notion, “I just really liked the translations in Spanish because it has a touch of poetry,” she says. “It made it very beautiful and that’s why I like singing in different languages – it changes it up and it adds a different feel to it.”
• Castillo was born and raised in Houston, Texas, speaking English as a first language. However, her dad spoke Spanish, which made it natural for her to learn. She’s been quoted in interviews as saying that she’s proud of her Latin heritage, as well as that she intentionally tried to incorporate it into her music because she had to teach herself Spanish.

Alaina’s Rise to Stardom

• Alaina has had an active YouTube channel since 2010, when she was just 11 years old. Since creating her channel, she has primarily shifted her focus from ASMR-inspired cover videos to original music.
• In 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Alaina moved from Texas to Los Angeles, hoping to kick-start her career. During her early months in the city, she spent the majority of her time at home recording videos or in the studio making new songs. A hard worker, At just 21 years old, Alaina was ready and willing to leave her friends and family behind for the sake of her art. However, she returned to Texas for Christmas 2020, visiting her parents after they recovered from COVID-19.

How Alaina Makes Music

• Alaina pays close attention to the fact that her audience is essentially split between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking listeners. Thus, she intuitively decides which language to sing in for specific parts of certain songs. She told Notion, “When I’m in the studio, sometimes I’ll sing in Spanish, sometimes in English so that’s what we put into the songs, depending on what sounded like it fit more naturally.”
• While many artists blend languages as a stylistic decision, Alaina has made singing in Spanish and English a signature aspect of her sound. She’s also included elements of the e-girl trend in her visual style, a movement on social media characterized by certain choices in the realms of fashion and hobbies.
• Everything that Alaina does on social media and the internet at large – including streaming on Twitch – is intricately tied to her music career. Her widespread online presence and integration into the YouTube community, as well as the gaming community of Twitch, has helped to increase her sphere of influence and expose her music to fans around the world.
• A recent track by Alaina, “Stfu (i got u),” has a distinctly poppy feel, accompanied by a digitized, neon-soaked music video. However, there are plenty of sides to Alaina’s music. Her hushed, ASMR-tinged covers, which helped her gain stardom on YouTube, show a much more subdued dimension of the singer’s talent.

What’s Next for Alaina?

Throughout 2021, Alaina has been releasing new music, including her much-anticipated Parallel Universe Pt. 1 EP. She told Dork magazine that the making of the EP was a tough process that took plenty of determination and vulnerability. “I took a second to find what I wanted my sound to be like because for a long time I was saying I’m looking for a sound and something I can relate to,” she told Dork. “I had to step out of my own boundaries and comfort zones. With this album, it’s the start of who I’m supposed to become.”