Young Cocoa On Brewing His Current Musical Flavor: “I’m a lot more sure about what I want now than I did in the beginning.”

Six years deep in the OPM music scene, Young Cocoa (Elyon Barrera) is only scratching the surface.

2025 started with a few creative breakthroughs from the 27-year-old Iloilo-born and Jakarta-raised rapper. He started making demos at the start of the year to keep the creative juices flowing and stay active. He worked with his producer Joseph Gregory, also known as JGreg, and came up with the initial demo for “Cheap Thrills,” a collab track he released last July with R&B artist DEMI.

Like other artists who can’t seem to have a breakthrough and finish what they started, he was ready to send the first verse of “Cheap Thrills” to the “graveyard,” he told Billboard Philippines in an exclusive interview. After conversations with the people around him, who suggested simply removing the first verse he didn’t like, finding a collaborator for the track became the next move.

“I was just like, ‘Okay, you know what, I’ve always wanted to work with number one, a female, and just work with people in general, like I’ve been opening up to it,” he shares. The opportunity to work with DEMI came knocking. Despite the differences in melodies and the overall “swag” of the two artists, everything fell into place.

The experience was both fun and challenging in a sense that they had to work on the track remotely. “Honestly, like when I got her verse in, like, I had nothing to say. It was already really, really good,” he says. For him, an interesting takeaway from the partnership was the way DEMI interpreted the song.

“We didn’t really give her notes about what the song meant, at least to me. I also wanted to see how she’d interpret it, and then she made it like super, super sensual,” he explains.The track was different from how it started, but for Young Cocoa, the process was like taking separate routes and still arriving at the same destination.

“Every time I work remotely with somebody, it teaches me a lot about communication, like really being clear about what you want, or what, I mean, it goes two ways,” he shares.

“Cheap Thrills” featured heavy influences from Tyler, the Creator, Justin Timberlake, and Pharrell Williams, to name a few, stemming from his love for the early 2000s sound. Even with these influences, it’s his songwriting, drawn from personal experiences, that ultimately makes his tracks his own.

The track itself stemmed from his real-life experiences in dating and relationships during his college years. “I could think of like two things where I had to flip a situation because I didn’t have money,” he shares. He talked about planning a whole meetup, from taking the bus going to EDSA and calculating how much the fare is going to cost to making sure that he can afford a milk tea or a coffee when he arrives at his date.

Through his songwriting, he mentions that one can draw from anywhere at any point in life, having written songs not just based on his own experiences but also on those of his friends. “But for me, the way that I go about songwriting, as long as it’s real, as long as I’m referencing something that is going on around me, then it’s authentic to me,” he adds.

“But when you write something from your experiences, and how it translates to when you perform, I think that’s the biggest difference maker. Because when I perform a song that I wrote with my life in mind, I can really convey that feeling. And then that kind of just like, cascades into like, the way that I talk about the song,” he explains.

“If there’s anything that I know about myself and my artistry is like, I don’t think I’ll ever stop experimenting, and this is just part of it,” he adds. “I’m continuing to learn a lot, you know, that’s what matters to me.”

Having been in the music scene for over six years, he made waves with his 2021 single “Manila,” which also gained attention outside the country. When asked about following up on that success, he shared that he didn’t really do so. “I’m very grateful for ‘Manila’ to give me, to put me in the place that I’m in right now […] I really was [just] so curious about the rest of the world in terms of sound, different soundscapes that I could tap into,” he explains.

With the genre offering different routes and avenues, Young Cocoa uses his platform to continue exploring, such as tapping into a style of hip-hop that leans more toward the alternative. “I’m in hip-hop, but I’m from the suburbs, so, you know, I grew up in the ‘burbs, man,” he shares.

“I’m a lot more sure about what I want now than I did in the beginning,” he adds. With more music on the horizon, Young Cocoa is looking to lock in more collaborations this year. He’s also thinking about working with artists across Southeast Asia, which he says is outside the country but not too far away.

He assures that the songs currently brewing in the studio won’t sound the same, as they are more intentional rather than just following what’s currently popular. Beyond the fact that there’s so much going on in the OPM scene right now, both the mainstream and underground are leveling up, something he adds he’s really excited to be a part of.

As a way to honor how far he has come and being open for more opportunities on the way, he says to his younger self to not change anything, “Keep exploring, like, explore even more if I could change something, you know what I mean? Like, it took a long time for me to feel really, really, really solid with my sound. But I’m really happy that I did the legwork in the beginning to try to, like, piece things together.”