FEATURE: Spotlight: Kilo Kish — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Kilo Kish

__________

BECAUSE she released…

one of this year’s best and under-reviewed albums, I want to feature the magnificent Kilo Kish in this Spotlight. Whilst not brand-new and fresh to the music world, she is definitely still coming through I feel. An artist who is both confidently realised yet not quite near her creative peak yet, this is an exciting time for the Florida-born songwriter and visual artist. Many will know her work already, she released her debut over ten years ago now. Her debut album, Reflections in Real Time, arrived in 2016, although I think American Gurl is her finest work. I have only seen a few reviews for the album. I will bring in a couple shortly. In spite of the fact there are few reviews for AMERICAN GURL and the music media shamelessly seemed to overlook such an incredible album that ranks alongside the best of 2022, there were quite a few interviews to promote it. Some big-name publications and sites too! A hugely respected musician with limitless talent, I want to set the scene and explore more of Kilo Kish’s year. Although she has been making magnificent music for over a decade now, I am going to drop songs from AMERICAN GURL through this feature, as it is her recent album and one that I think is overlooked and should be celebrated and talked about more. There are some really interesting interviews that I have found that tell us more about Kilo Kish and the phenomenal AMERICAN GURL.

The first interview I want to source from is Okayplayer. I was interested reading about Kilo Kish’s upbringing in Orlando and how she feels she has progressed in the past decade. Even though it has been a busy and successful decade, I think her best days and work still lie ahead. She is such a compelling person to read about. Such a raw talent with a very long future in the industry. Barely in her thirties, we are going to see Kilo Kish grow and produce sensational albums for years to come:

“Kilo Kish has never wanted to fit in. For the past 10 years, music has been the connecting factor between all the creative spaces the multi-hyphenate exists in. But before she became known as the alternative Black artist behind music projects like her 2012 debut Homeschool EP and the recently-released American Gurl (as well as a visual artist whose work has been displayed at The Getty Center and The Hammer Museum), Kish was Lakesha Robinson, a kid from Orlando, Florida.

From a young age, Kish felt different from those she grew up with because of her interests: listening to Bjork, cutting up and creating clothes, and reading Vogue. But she found camaraderie in a group of close friends she did everything with when she started to attend Winter Park High School, as well as friends she met in church.

“[High school] was pretty chill, it was also kind of crazy. When I was in high school, I just also smoked weed a bunch and did drugs,” she said. “It was weird because it was this dichotomy of having all this academic stuff and then also exploring.”

Let’s start at the beginning, what was it like growing up in Orlando?

I painted a lot. I was really into graffiti and I was trying to learn how to do spray paint and graffiti. I would always cut up clothes and try to make clothes. So yeah, I was creative. I tried to be on the step team. That didn’t really work out that well. I was really a part of my church as well. I was always at church because my mom was super religious, which was fun. I felt like I could be who I wanted to be, but I definitely felt different. People were like, “She’s a little bit weird, that one.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Ray Brady

Hip-hop was poppin’ in the South at that time but people weren’t listening to hip-hop from the North, at least that’s my experience. So it was just very interesting. My parents are from up here.

Mine, too. My mom, it was like she would always be like, “You’re from up North.” She would always try to say that. And I [would tell her], “I actually was born here and I’ve been living here this whole time, so I’m pretty much Floridian.” She’s like, “You spent time in New Jersey. You’re from up north.” It’s like, it was this weird thing of not wanting to be “country” or that kind of vibe.

It’s been ten years since your first SoundCloud project. How does that feel?

I feel good about the last 10 years. I feel like, obviously, some things did not go as planned but that’s just the nature of life and learning a whole industry — a hard industry as well. I feel like I have created a space for myself that’s mine, that’s unique, and that’s all that I really wanted to do. Be as honest and truthful as I can about who I am and explore it and learn more about myself, and learn more about my world and dissect it.

I also feel like in the last 10 years, so much of my time was spent trying to fit into music. And it’s like — from the very get-go, I wasn’t interested in the same things that my music artist peers were interested in, and I fought against that for so many years. It’s just not my personality. I like to work by myself. I like to be insular. I like to be heady and think about things, and then I like to share them and present them at the end and give context and all of that, as opposed to being a personality that’s constantly in your face and people are constantly seeing.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ray Brady

What was the driving force behind your new album American Gurl?

I was super, super, super burned out. And I was frustrated with all the things that I was talking about before. I was frustrated by [the] industry and teams and trying to do all of these different things. I mean, being alternative — alternative black artists in general — it’s a weird kind of space that people don’t really always know where to [put us]. It’s much more well-received now, but I think sometimes people are like, “Well, can’t you just do it like this? Or can’t you just do it like that?” I think this project was like me detoxifying myself from all of the stuff that I heard all the time and the people that I was around, and the scenes and the conversations and just the sugarcoated nature of everything.

I don’t know why, I just started thinking about McDonald’s in this way — like sugary candy and Coca-Cola. I just started thinking, “What if I made an album that feels really bright and really kind of like pop on the surface, but then it’s really diving into some themes?” It’s kind of more like Reflections in Real Time, where it’s something that’s very near and dear to me but it’s coated in this plastic. That’s the theme of American Gurl — exploring that I am a product of my environment and these are the things that have been put on me in this time so far”.

AMERICAN GURL is an album I have been playing a bit since I heard it earlier in the year. Each time I pass through it, a different song jumps up and me and reveals something new. I have detected a definite shift and evolution in Kilo Kish’s sound since her earliest work. I am fascinated to see where she goes next. Teen Vogue spoke with Kilo Kish earlier in the year. It seems that it has been an intense period of work for her. Putting her all into the creative process, rather than AMERICAN GURL sounded burned out and tired, it is an album that is full of incredible lyrics, wonderful performances, nuanced songs and fresh incentive and energy:

“Teen Vogue: It’s been six years since your last album. What have you been doing in that time span?

Kilo Kish: Between Reflections and now, I’ve done a couple of EPs and toured a little bit and had two solo art shows and one group show. I’ve just been working the whole time. It doesn’t really feel like it’s been six years. It’s just been like continually doing things because once the album’s come out, I also then do all the creative for the rest of the album. Then there’s video, and I direct those. Then there’s merch and touring and then I’m directing and figuring that out, so it doesn’t feel like that much time has gone by, but it totally has.

I think what set up this particular album is that I was just working a lot, and I felt really just tired and strained by the process of going, going, going and doing, doing, doing. It kind of made me dissect what our culture is a bit. I started writing this album in 2019, and I wrote REDUX [Kish’s 2019 EP] in between that, then I toured [for] REDUX. When the pandemic happened, it really gave me time to think about what I had been doing for the past years, my workload and if I was happy in the life that I created for myself…it really just was dissecting a lot of like, what it means to have to make your own way, and I think the values that people preach in America are a lot of that. I really wanted to use Americanism as an umbrella to dissect some of these things that I was dealing with. Am I where I want to be financially? Did I do enough? Am I working hard enough? Am I pretty enough? Am I good enough?

TV: Did you learn anything about yourself in the process?

KK: I guess I’m just always looking for freedom. Whatever the purest form of freedom is, I’m always trying to find it. I don’t know if it’s fully attainable, but I think by figuring out the places that you don’t necessarily feel free, you’re able to kind of get a sense of what would make you happier. This project is basically unburdening myself a little bit from the things that I thought I had to care about or the things that I thought I needed to do to be happy and be successful, and dissecting what is success today because it’s not what it was five years ago. It’s not what it was 10 years ago.

TV: You always take a detailed, interdisciplinary approach when creating art, music and fashion. How does that come to you?

KK: I'll come up with a theme first. Then, I will personally craft each thing to fit into that theme and to tell an overall story of the project. And then that's what I do on the music side. And then I do it on the visual side. And then I do it all across the creation of the project, so that there's layers of depth alluding back to that same central theme and asking questions in all of the different spaces. Sometimes I can do installations around, you know, the projects themselves and music project, so it's more of a multi-layered approach than generally focusing on making an album to only be digested as an album.

TV: AMERICAN GURL is orchestrated conceptually as a video game. The album starts with characters deciding to play the game “American Gurl” and ends with them being annoyed that the game abruptly ends. What made you think of implementing that for the album?

KK: Initially, the album was kind of dissecting the entertainment game that people essentially are always referencing, so I thought it would be fun to actually make a real game that you could play. so I might try to do something like that. I want to still make that for this project, but games take a long time. I was like. maybe I can play on past memories and things and mesh it all together. I also grew up in New Jersey for a part of my life and we would always go down to the shore and we’d go to the boardwalk, so the memory of arcades just in general and the sounds of coins, the sound of commerce — the brightness and richness of sound in an arcade — it just reminds me of industry. All of these things are bright and shiny, and I think sometimes that’s kind of what art is like and how artists are marketed. We’re all for sale, we’re all bright and shiny, we’re all loud and we’re all intense, so it’s a good introduction to the things I’m discussing, which is my relationship to the music game or the game of trying to make it as a working artist”.

There are a couple of other interviews I want to drop in before getting to some reviews. Reading this interview from NYLON, and it is interesting learning what direction she intended to take AMERICAN GURL in first – compared to how it actually sounded in the end:

“The majority of American Gurl came together in 2019, the concept spawned from a conversation where she was discussing the perceptual limitations of Blackness. She doesn’t remember specifics, but recalls questions she asked herself: “Who would want to see me doing [conventional pop]? Why can’t I be an American girl?” Its release kept getting pushed off by the unraveling of the outside world — the pandemic’s onset, the murder of George Floyd. Similar to the way a social media feed can change in the blink of an eye, the context in which American Gurl was written has completely evaporated. Now, as we speak on her brief trip to New York, Russia wages war on Ukraine putting us on the edge of another world war. Kish can’t help but laugh: “This is the wildest time to try and dissect this part of our culture.”

She says that she intended to go the route of Lenny Kravitz or Gnarls Barkley for this album’s sound but states that the final result was a “Kilo Kish record, but a strange one.” Produced by Ray Brady, American Gurl’s fourteen tracks are a mash of new wave industrial pop, disco, dance punk, and trip hop while Kish dances with national and personal ego. The resulting whiplash concoction of pop is the background for her trying on different roles in order to understand herself further in relation to our warped, overstimulated reality. “What will it take to satisfy?” she asks on the robotic ballad “Distractions III: Spoiled Rotten.” The track pokes at her frustrations with consumerism by stepping into an exaggerated character whose insatiable hunger for things is never satisfied.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ray Brady

“I’d like to think, ‘Oh I’m a purist. I do things purely for the sake of art and making and giving,’” she says in a mocking tone. “But that way has been tainted through the worlds that I’ve gone through and through the seasons that I’ve lived through and through these years in this industry. Even if I was pure or if anybody was, it’s really hard to stay that way given what you need to do to survive and what is the name of the game. You go to a magazine shoot or you go to a fashion shoot and they’re like, ‘We want authentically you but actually can it be like this and can you put this on and can you say that exact thing you just said but like this?’”

It’s easy to get sucked up into American Gurl’s momentum without immediately recognizing its dark underbelly. Like a lollipop with a vitriolic center, the poppiest moments contain insidious sentiments. That fine balance not only mirrors this world’s current contradictions, but is evidence Kish is honing her craft. “The older I get and the better I get at what I do, it's like I'm able to juxtapose it better versus hitting you over the head [with] brain dumps,” she says, noting that American Gurl is more nuanced than Reflections. “If you don't want to go there with me you don't have to.

Kish is not an artist who wants to supply an answer, and she’s aware that the questions she’s asking don’t have a definitive response. So why bother to even ask these questions? Why make art that probes knowing there won’t be an explanation? “I’m restless, obviously,” she laughs. “I have a lot of energy. If it doesn’t go somewhere then it’s in me being anxiety. It’s a healthy way of getting out my fears and worries and confusion about the general nature of living.” As she continues, it seems that asking questions is her source of personal freedom. “It’s a part of my personality to constantly be wondering what’s deeper,” she concludes. Without that curiosity, she wouldn’t know who she would be”.

Maybe not directly connected to the music, I found an article and interview that discussed the ‘AMERICAN GURL style’. A connection between fashion/looks and various songs. Vogue’s feature helped bring new angles and light to the album. It made me think differently about it and, in the process, taught my new things about the incredible Kilo Kish:

“The album concept and look are Kish’s exploration of herself as she tries to understand who she is without the gaze of others. “It was me dissecting where I’ve been up until this point, my upbringing, the different subcultures that I’ve been a part of, and some of the tropes and identities associated with those,” she says of the album. “I realized that by 30, I have been indoctrinated in so many different ways of being within the music industry, then modeling, doing fashion stuff, and all of that. I was feeling, ‘Okay, what of all of this, if any, is me?’ ”

Kish’s searching isn’t a surprise: She moved to New York more than a decade ago at 18 and found herself smack-dab within the city’s scene, influenced by each social group’s styles and the larger trends at the time. Kish, who attended the Fashion Institute of Technology, recalls the “indie sleaze” era of the late to mid-’00s in which she’d wear ripped tights with jean shorts, baggy shirts, and Lacoste cardigans, which she describes as “art clothes.” Later on, in the early-’10s, she ventured into modeling and wore all black. While making music more professionally in 2012, she began to pull designer pieces and references items from the now-defunct label Elizabeth & James (founded by the Olsen twins). Eventually, Kish began to morph into the sartorial shapeshifter she’s known as today. She went through her big-suit David Byrne era around 2016 during her Reflections in Real Time album, and even wore a tutu “for a month straight.”

For her American Gurl album, Kish chose to wear American designers. Rodarte was a special influence, and allowed her to pull archival gowns for the images promoting her songs, which are designed like retro postcards and show Kish in different characters. On one, she’s wearing a frill-trimmed pink dress, superimposed on the photo of a resort with the kitschy text “Spoiled Rotten” and in another, which reads “Attention Politician,” in an ’80s-style fuchsia dress floating in front of a cityscape. “It was playing different characters in that world and then we used their different gowns to play different Americana characters," she says, noting her dress on the “Bloody Future" and “New Tricks” covers. “I have a yellow dress with all the bows on it where I am playing the character of a Southern belle.” Another special piece through this album process was, of course, that aforementioned American flag dress by Batsheva. “[Without] having that dress, would it have driven home the images much? Not really,” she says. “In some ways, it really can drive home the message that you’re trying to portray with the song”

Kish finds a kinship with the label Batsheva, which is known for—depending on your perspective—its frumpy-chic flair and its subversive qualities. Kish sees the dresses as layered and sublime, something that speaks to Kish’s own style. “It’s the juxtaposition of two things, which I like about [designer Batsheva Hay’s] designs,” says Kish. “When you go to her show, the models are having blue wigs and wild makeup and big hair. But then, the dresses themselves are quite conservative. It’s really the person wearing the dress more than the dress itself. It comes out punk in a way still, even though they’re not leather and all these things. It’s really buttoned up, but also going to rip your face off in a way, which is why I like her designs.”

Ultimately, Kish may have not cracked the code to who she is–but who has? Don’t expect her latest look to be permanent either. “I’ve been trying to accept that I am a mixture of these things and I am a product of all these things. Just because part of me as an artist always wants to be pure and not sell out and try to do the best possible work I can do, doesn’t mean that I also don’t want to be frivolous at times,” she says. “I think it’s really accepting that there’s more than duality to people. There are all of these different layers at play, and just really being accepting of, ‘Okay, today I want to be a fashion girl.’ It is what it is. That doesn’t preclude me from being something else in another moment”.

Let’s finish off with some positive reviews from an astonishing 2022 release. AMERICAN GURL is the latest chapter and big step from an artist whose music warrants wider exposure. I have heard a song or two of hers played on U.K. radio, but I don’t think she is as widely known here as she is in the U.S. In any case, go and follow her on social media and acquaint yourself with her work so far. Vinyl Chapters were among the few that gave AMERICAN GURL a spin and afforded it a deep and impassioned review:

“Kilo Kish’s AMERICAN GURL is an all killer, no filler album that interrogates the entertainment industry.

The clinking of coins in slots and the cheerful blips and beeps of arcade machines set the scene for AMERICAN GURL—a clever choice of backdrop for an album which, in visual artist and musician Kilo Kish’s words, explores ‘the American game’. Clocking in at 40 minutes and 14 songs, the American singer’s first album since 2016’s Reflections in Real Time brings forward a smorgasbord of variations on her usual dark art-pop sound.

The album makes it clear that if the public eye is going to be watching Kilo Kish, she’s going to stare straight back. AMERICAN GURL manages to be at once more experimental and more refined than Kish’s previous work, successfully performing the delicate balancing act between lyrics and musicality without compromising one for the other.

Each track is a carefully-crafted interrogation of the themes of fame, success and identity that run through the album; it’s a dissection of Kish’s personal image just as much as of the entertainment industry on a larger scale. “Who are you, baby? / Who are you keeping around?”, she asks over bright synths on title track AMERICAN GURL, introducing the key questions that lie at the album’s core. ATTENTION POLITICIAN is full of apathy, from its warped, dissonant synths to Kish’s unapologetic, attitude-packed delivery (“Ring my telephone / What, what, what / I’m in another zone / What, what, what”). NEW TRICKS: ART, AESTHETICS, AND MONEY has a similar dystopian aesthetic: “Congeniality is a basis for content / Peddling narcissism wrapped in self-love and progress / You want it, I got it / This soul is a bargain (I know you want it)”, Kish teaches to the students in her classroom, her monotone voice set over a mechanical instrumental.

Each track brings along a change in tone and style, making clear that Kish’s exploration of breaking down and remaking her image isn’t only limited to her lyrics. Once-bright synths turn subterranean on tracks like DEATH FANTASY, where they’re complemented by dull stabs of percussion and a shift to a more raspy vocal style. Behind these elements, you catch clips of ethereal falsetto from Californian R&B singer Miguel, without which the track wouldn’t have quite the same effect. It’s these careful sound design choices that separate Kish and her album from her contemporaries.

DISTRACTIONS III: SPOILED ROTTEN is a glitchy cut that features the beeping of machines, the dialing sounds of a telephone, and a repeated bridge (“Gimme, gimme, gimme, gimme,”) that dissolves into a fake laugh. BLOODY FUTURE brings in a twinkling electronic Baroque motif, while NEW TRICKS features writing on a blackboard, a siren blaring, and ticking, clock-like percussion. All of these background sounds—including the occasional ‘levelling up’ sound (as at the end of ATTENTION POLITICIAN) that cleverly reminds us we’re still in the arcade—transforms the album into something closer to an experience.

But all experiences, whether good or bad, must eventually come to an end. “Is that it? That can’t be it,” the party of arcade-goers asks on the outro track, CONTINUE?, a sentiment likely shared by anyone who reaches the end of AMERICAN GURL. It’s an undoubtedly original album, maybe an acquired taste for some—and while the girls bashing the game machine might be unsatisfied, it’s unlikely the listener will finish the album feeling the same way.

Score 4.5/5”.

I am going to finish off with a review from The Line of Best Fit. One of the few British reviews I have seen, their promotion and word would have helped introduce Kilo Kish to a new audience here. I do think that AMERICAN GURL stands up against the best albums of this year. The Line of Best Fit were especially impressed by the video game-based concept of the album:

“The “we live in a society” record, which is more commentary on life than guilt-free pop collection, is a high risk, high reward career move. Janet Jackson provided grooves and commentary in equal measure with Rhythm Nation 1814 and produced a career-defining work, but Madonna took herself too seriously with American Life. Recently, MARINA’s Ancient Dreams In A Modern Land was a welcome sonic reprieve from past efforts, it still dawdled with superficial observations. With electro-alternative artist Kilo Kish’s AMERICAN GURL, however, she masters the formula of how to make pop music with a message, one that doesn’t make you feel bad listening to it.

The album is bookended by two skits – “PLAY” and “CONTINUE?” – which set up the project and explain the video game effects littered through the album. On the intro, two women enter an arcade and the “AMERICAN GURL” game catches their eye and decide to play. The album that follows is essentially the game, an incredibly smart move – every idea, concept, or theme is delivered with a wink in Kish’s eye. It’s all just part of the bit… Or is it?

The title track is the most straightforward pop song on the album –featuring a catchy beat and horn-like synths, Kish questions, “Who are you, baby? / Who are you keeping around?” Then declares, “I’m changing places / So I can’t see you anymore.” Her ambitions are simply too much for everyone else; her satirical worldview posits herself as enlightened, above it all. And she’s not sorry about it either – “NO APOLOGY!”, which comes later, is all about the absence of remorse.

“NEW TRICKS: ART, AESTHETICS AND MONEY”, the best song on the album, is a braggadocious banger delivered in the smartest, most polite way possible. Other rappers get to the point – I have so much money! – but Kish’s intelligent, even poetic lyricism comes through with “A Linx, a platinum leash / Affixed to my wallet / My hand, my stone-laced hand / Affixed to my pocket.” Frequent collaborator Vince Stapes is a feature on this track, but just ad-libs; he knows the focus is on Kish and her allegories of dogs, control, and obedience. “Man, you’re yanking my collar / Can’t dance for your dollar again,” she croons over the harsh beat.

The penultimate track, “INTELLIGENT DESIGN” seems like a reference to artificial intelligence, the future, and dystopian visions; The “Hello! Hello!” chants on the chorus bring to mind the “Hello, World!” output programs of AI. “I get up just to say / ‘I still want what this is now,’” Kish says on the pre-chorus, jaded by the onslaught of future technical progress”.

An artist I am keen for more people to know about, Kilo Kish’s AMERICAN GURL is proof of her incredible talent and vision. She has looked back and celebrated a decade of releasing music. It is interesting hearing her thoughts about how she has evolved as an artist. There is no doubt that the wonderful Kilo Kish has…