While the ties that bind the Burns Twins to the current crop of top-level talent in the city might be somewhat obvious from the outside looking in, the other players in the new wave approached the scene from a more round-about way. To be sure, Kaina Castillo has been preparing for centerstage her for a long time. A true student of the scene if there ever was one, the 21-year-old spent her later teen years hopping from one program to the next, always open to help out and work late. I can still remember walking into my living room in the winter of 2014 around midnight to see Castillo alongside Peter CottonTale behind the piano, taking notes and applying theories. My first real introduction came while working with The O’My’s, a band that was a big early influence on the young singer and taught her plenty about what it really took to make it with music that aims for everlasting over effervescent. Serving as a sort of pseudo-assistant/manager, she quickly became enamored with the scene, diving in herself in the process.

“I’ve been doing this run around since high school and my freshman year of college I was literally interning for everyone,” Castillo said, reflecting on those first experiences while sitting across a white porcelain table of a Pilsen photo studio. “I was Mariah Neuroth’s intern at YCA and she liked my work ethic and she was managing Noname and The O’My’s so I was doing work for both of them and then Sharod Smith, Jamila Woods’ manager picked up on that and wanted me to do stuff for him too so I started doing that. I was literally working for YCA and then all these artists but just out of a sort of hunger to learn more, I wasn’t thinking music back then yet.”

Because of her position, nestled between some of the city and country’s most influential artists and organizers, Castillo found she had a knack for bringing different people together. Pervasively bubbly, with a smile that never seems to start too far, the 21-year-old is perfectly suited to help stitch together the various pieces that make up the patchwork collection that is the current wave. In the process, she’s not only found her voice, but made an unexpected and exciting move to centerstage with the release of Sweet ASL which she debuted as Kaina & The Burns Twins.

“When I meet folks my brain thinks about who they would be great friends with, it could be with anything. If I meet a photographer and I like his work I’m like ‘oh shit you would be great friends with this person’ so I actually started bringing Eddie with me to The O’My’s sessions and introduce him to them and then Ric happened to be there and I was like ‘oh Ric, this is my friend Eddie, you guys should connect,’” said Castillo. “So I don’t know, I just want to look out for my friends and folks and be like ‘you guys should work together’ and then they do that same thing for me, so it’s really just been that. It’s just a never-ending little network, but it’s not even tiny, it’s huge. It feels small, but you forget how many people are available here at any time.