Bedroom artist Neytan asks one of life’s most important questions, and we are not prepared for the answer.
There is a very specific type of love — the kind that blooms under fluorescent lighting, lulled by the rumble of an engine and the crackle of an AM radio playing Air Supply at full sentiment. It is bus-ride love. It is mahal kita pero hindi ko sinasabi love. And Nathan Del Mundo, the Manila-based bedroom artist performing as neytan, has written its anthem.
His newest single, “Ano Lasa ng Pag-ibig? Edi Tipaklong,” dropped this month and immediately did what only the best love songs do. It made everyone feel something they couldn’t quite name, and then laugh at themselves for feeling it.
The title, which translates loosely to “What does love taste like? Grasshoppers, obviously,” is pure neytan. It is tender and absurd in equal measure, a punchline that lands softer than it should because somewhere underneath the joke, there is a real ache.
The track arrives on the heels of “Out of Tempo Out of Time,” his groove-laden October 2025 release that earned him a quietly devoted fanbase. With that track, he established himself as someone who understood rhythm. With this one, he proves he understands longing.
He first conceived “Tipaklong” on a restless night, left it unfinished for months the way you leave a feeling unspoken, then returned to it with collaborators Reese Medestomas on keys and JP Napiza on strings. The result is something that sounds like nostalgia before you’ve even lost the thing.
“There is always a specific type of love songs displayed on bus rides,” he says, citing Air Supply, Stephen Bishop, and Jaya as his north stars for this release. Which is to say, he is reaching for the classics, but arriving somewhere entirely his own.
What makes Neytan’s songwriting so magnetic is precisely its ability to be earnest without being saccharine, funny without undermining the feeling. He writes as someone who has thought deeply about love and then decided the best response is to shrug and write a bop about it. As he puts it himself, “I just wanted to write another love song with nonsense lyrics that has that feeling of love that you can’t really deny the genuineness of it.”
“Ano Lasa ng Pag-ibig? Edi Tipaklong” is not a song that explains itself. It doesn’t need to. It simply arrives, finds you in transit, and makes you feel briefly, beautifully seen, the way the best bus-ride songs always do.
Stream it now on all platforms.