Two lattes and a cream cheese garlic bread from Smoking Tiger felt like the right choice for a warm Saturday afternoon for Andrea and Jewlz of The Two Lips.
Seated side by side, they talk over each other while laughing, finishing each other’s sentences, and letting thoughts spill out unfiltered. It’s a perfect day in Cerritos, California, sunny and easygoing, and they match that ease completely.
There’s no sense of performance with them. No rush, no pretense. Just two best friends, back in the neighborhood that raised them, ordering drinks and casually chatting. It’s easy to forget, sitting across from them, that The Two Lips is one of Los Angeles’ rising indie dream pop duos. Even easier to forget that they’re about to play both weekends of Coachella on Friday and April 17. Because here, at home, they’re simply two friends doing what they’ve always done: hanging out and figuring out what they love to do together.
Home, for them, is Cerritos—or technically Artesia, they clarify, laughing, referring to the neighboring city. “You cross the street and it’s one or the other,” Andrea says. “It’s like the epicenter.” It’s a place defined less by borders and more by the overlap of Filipino bakeries next to Mexican restaurants, Korean cafés like the one we’re at, tucked between plazas, along with the homes of families who have lived here for decades. Andrea is Mexican, and Jewlz is Mexican and Filipino American. Their upbringing exists in the in-between: fluid, layered, and deeply rooted in community.
Jewlz remembers the lively, joyful Filipino spirit from visiting her mom’s hometown in the Philippines as a kid, a feeling that stayed with her as she grew up in California. She talks about her lola with fondness, about the way her pride shows up in loud, unwavering ways, and how her family continues to support her by coming to their shows. “My mom’s always been supportive of whatever we wanted to do and I’m grateful for that,” she shares. “She’s a really big reason as to why we got our feet off the ground with The Two Lips because she was an investor. She believed in us. She was like, ‘If you guys want to do it, let’s just do it.’”
Andrea grew up singing in a predominantly Filipino Catholic church, immersed in a culture that wasn’t entirely her own, but became part of her anyway. “All my friends are Filipino,” she says. “I feel like I am one.”
Their closeness to culture, family, and each other runs through everything they do. It shows up in the way they create music, too. Long before The Two Lips existed, there was Mexican American singer-songwriter and Queen of Tejano music Selena, and award-winning Filipino singer and musician Gary Valenciano playing in the background, along with other Spanish-language music and original Pilipino music (OPM) love songs that expressed emotions English couldn’t quite capture. “Some words just sound more beautiful in Tagalog or Spanish,” Andrea says. “When you are listening to a song in your language, you feel connected to it more.”
Today, they also find inspiration in other Asian artists like beabadoobee, NIKI, and Lyn Lapid. Now, they’ve become that reflection for others. “Fans will be like, ‘I’m Mexican and Filipino too,’” they share. “We’re like, ‘We’re just like you guys.’”
Andrea & Jewlz of The Two Lips
Sophia Liv Maguire
Their story didn’t begin with a grand plan. It began, like most good things do, by accident, or maybe inevitability. The two young women grew up on the same street and attended the same middle school, orbiting the same spaces without ever quite colliding. It wasn’t until later, through social media, mutual friends, and a shared love of music, that they found each other.
Jewlz, who had spent a year studying music production in college, had already been making songs more seriously at first. “There weren’t that many female singers around here,” she says. “I wanted to work with another woman.” So she asked Andrea to hop on a track. That song, “Too Pretty,” was the first spark. Then came another, and another. Soon after, TikTok covers followed, eventually leading to live shows. It slowly became clear that something was clicking. “It was for fun. Until it wasn’t,” Jewlz explains about the transition from music being a hobby to it becoming a career.
“What we were doing was working because it resonated with a lot of people,” Andrea adds. “I feel like people like that because they see that we’re true genuine best friends and we love to do this.”
What they built didn’t come from expensive studios or industry connections. It came from bedrooms, laptops, and figuring things out as they went. Jewlz learned how to produce during the pandemic, recording songs at home with help from her boyfriend, sometimes finishing entire tracks in a single day. Andrea, who loves writing lyrics, shaped the emotional core of their sound. Together, it became a balance, “yin and yang,” as they describe it.
Even their name came together the same way: casually, almost accidentally. Inspired by the tulip emoji, then reinterpreted into something more fitting, The Two Lips. It’s playful, a little clever, a little romantic, and unintentionally (or maybe perfectly) aligned with the audience that’s found them: girls, queer folks, and anyone drawn to softness and sincerity.
If their music feels intimate, it’s because it is. Their songs—hazy, emotional, and dreamlike—are rooted in real conversations, real feelings, the kind you have on long drives or quiet nights. They write fast, often finishing songs in a single session, chasing a feeling before it disappears. “We’ll think about what we’re going through or what kind of sentiment we want to have in the song and then we walk in (the studio),” Andrea says.
Their breakthrough song “Still Love You (Todavia)” gained over 30 million streams on Spotify.
Sophia Liv Maguire
For a while, all of this existed alongside real life. Andrea was a kindergarten teacher, and Jewlz was a restaurant server. Music was something they squeezed in whenever they could. “We’d go to sessions after work,” Andrea says. “I don’t even know how we did it.”
The shift happened so quickly it almost didn’t feel real. Their track “Still Love You” took off after its release in December 2024, and suddenly there were meetings, management and a record label. What had been a side project became something bigger, something undeniable. “It hasn’t even been a year since we quit our jobs,” Andrea says, still sounding a little surprised by it.
Although Andrea misses teaching, both she and Jewlz recognized the moment for what it was: a rare opportunity and a leap worth taking. Jewlz, who had spent years saying she’d quit her job “next year,” finally had a reason to. “It feels nice,” she says simply.
Still, not much else has changed. They haven’t moved to Los Angeles. They still live with their families in the Cerritos and Artesia area. They visit places like Smoking Tiger, the neighborhoods that raised them. “It keeps us grounded,” Jewlz says. In a city like LA, where everyone is chasing something, staying rooted reminds them why they started in the first place.
That groundedness makes what’s happening next feel even more surreal.
They made their official label debut with Island Records and the song “Talk.”
Sophia Liv Maguire
The pair learned they’d be playing at Coachella while on tour in London. “Andrea was already knocked out, but because of the time difference. I was still awake,” Jewlz shares. “I woke her up and I was like, ‘Andrea! Andrea! Read the text!’ And it was from our manager being like, ‘You guys got an offer to play Coachella. It would be stupid to pass this up. Of course, you guys should do it.’”
At first, there was hesitation. Doubt, even: Is it too early? Are we ready? But the opportunity felt too big to question for long. “They must see something in us to want us to perform,” Andrea says. And when the lineup dropped, when their name appeared among artists they’d grown up listening to, it finally sank in. “Chills,” Jewlz says.
They’re still processing it. Still preparing. Still figuring it out as they go, the same way they always have. Their set, they promise, will be “really cute.” But beyond the aesthetics, beyond the milestone, Coachella represents something bigger. It’s proof that the thing they built in their bedrooms can exist on one of the world’s biggest stages.
They’ve opened for Sabrina Carpenter on tour.
Sophia Liv Maguire
Although Coachella is just around the corner, nothing about the pair feels drastically different.
At their core, they are still two friends who grew up on the same street. Still the friends who decided to make a song together just to see what would happen. Still the kind of artists who believe success isn’t about chasing fame, but about staying honest. “We’re not trying to make a hit so we can blow up and get extra famous,” Andrea says. “We just want people to find us and like us because we’re doing what we love and we’re doing it right, you know?”
What they’re building now—a debut album and a growing fanbase—is something they hope continues to unfold organically, rooted in the same values they started with: staying true to themselves.
As the afternoon light shifts and the café begins to fill, the conversation circles back to their fans, the ones who found them early, and the ones just discovering them now. “We want them to feel good. Seen. Heard,” Jewlz says. “At the end of the day, we’re really just two girls still figuring everything out. I just want people to know we’re here.”
For The Two Lips, music is meant to hold everything from sadness to joy and the in-between. “It’s okay to be sad,” Andrea says. “It’s great to be happy…Mahal kita. Mahal ko kayo.” (“I love you. I love you all” in Tagalog.)
Andrea and Jewlz want their listeners to grow alongside them, to find comfort in the same songs that once helped them make sense of their own emotions. In many ways, it’s a shared journey. As they continue to evolve, so do the people listening. “We’re just two girls who started making music in our bedroom,” Andrea says. “If we can do it, anyone can.” Jewlz nods. “Don’t be afraid to go for your passion.”
It’s the kind of sentiment you’ve heard before, but coming from them, sitting there in a small coffee shop in Cerritos, it doesn’t sound like a cliché. It feels like the truth.
