Two years after Alan Walker appeared as a finale-night guest on Anh Trai Say Hi, its successor Tinh Hà Say Hi is embedding five international hitmakers directly into the writing room — and using the moment to send Vietnamese music out into the world on its own terms.
In December 2024, Walker walked onto the ranking-finale stage of Anh Trai Say Hi for a few minutes of shared spotlight, and Vietnamese social media treated it like a national event. It was proof, at the time, that a homegrown competition show could pull a global name into the room. Eighteen months later, the format’s newest chapter is testing a harder question: What happens when the international names don’t just show up for the finale, but stay for the writing session?
Tinh Hà Say Hi, which premiered this summer as the latest installment of DatVietVAC’s “Vũ Trụ Say Hi” (“Say Hi Universe”), gathers 24 Vietnamese entertainment stars — each assigned the name of an actual star, framed as “individual points of light converging in one shared universe” — into a season built around real production challenges rather than pure performance. The show airs Saturdays at 8 p.m. on VieON, HTV2’s Vie Channel and YouTube, and its cast has been open about the toll of the premium format: rapper-singer CAPTAIN BOY has described workdays running past 10 hours, a pace that pushed the cast toward collective problem-solving over individual competition, while cast member WEAN has called the season “a journey beyond limits,” one where artists are expected to walk away with tangible creative output, not just screen time.
That output is where the show’s fourth live stage marks a real departure from the Alan Walker moment. For this round, production brought in five internationally credentialed producers to co-write and build tracks alongside the cast, rather than perform for them. Danny Chung, a Korean-American lyricist attached to THEBLACKLABEL, has writing credits across major K-pop releases and on the Netflix/Sony Animation KPop Demon Hunters soundtrack, which topped the Billboard 200. FrancisGotHeat, a Grammy-nominated Vietnamese-Canadian producer, has worked with Drake, Big Sean and ZAYN. Dylan Matthew, a U.S.-based EDM and pop producer, co-built SLANDER material that went RIAA double-platinum. Softest Hard, a Vietnamese-American DJ and producer known for blending bass music with melodic songwriting, has worked across the K-pop system. SOFTSERVEBOY, known offstage as Peter Chun, is a six-times multi-platinum, Berklee-trained producer working in pop and R&B.
Two of the five — FrancisGotHeat and Softest Hard — are of Vietnamese descent, and their presence on set carried its own charge. Softest Hard has said the project prompted her to learn her own Vietnamese name for the first time, and she noted watching Vietnamese diaspora communities online track the show in real time. Producers close to the project describe the pairing as one of the more substantial international crossovers a Vietnamese entertainment format has attempted — not a borrowed name for a single night, but a shared credit line.
That distinction is the point. When Walker appeared in 2024, the story traveled through Vietnamese coverage of a foreign star’s visit. When five producers with their own fanbases, press relationships and industry standing sit in a studio writing original music with Vietnamese artists, the story has a chance to travel the other direction — through their own platforms, their own interviews, their own audiences abroad. It is a slower, more structured route into international visibility than a single viral clip, but arguably a sturdier one: international listeners encountering Vietnamese pop through the credibility of producers they already follow, rather than through a press release. It doubles as an introduction to a wider case — that Vietnam’s youngest generation of artists, and the culture they come from, has more to offer than a single collaboration can show.
The show’s producers have been careful that the exchange runs both ways. Vietnamese identity is not something the season sets aside to accommodate its international guests; the star-naming concept, the show’s insistence on tying every collaboration back to the “Say Hi Universe” mythology, and the visible pride the Vietnamese cast takes in explaining their culture to collaborators unfamiliar with it are all treated as central to the format, not decoration around it. For a show built on outward-facing collaboration, protecting that core has become as much a part of the pitch as the credentials of its guest producers.
Whether Tinh Hà Say Hi becomes a template for how Vietnamese entertainment formats work with international talent, or a one-season experiment, may depend on what those five producers say about it once they are back in their own studios, talking to their own audiences. That, more than the finale-night cameo model it replaced, is the real test the show has set for itself.