Kilo Kish on Influence, Endurance, and Bringing Bloghouse Back

This is a free post from Larry Fitzmaurice's Last Donut of the Night newsletter. Paid subscribers get one or two email-only Baker's Dozens every week featuring music I've been listening to and some critical observations around it.

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I've followed her work since the beginning, but Kilo Kish's previous record AMERICAN GURL perked my ears up as it tilted towards the brash, sweet'n'sour bloghouse sound that I am always fascinated with whenever it bubbles up into the culture again (which, by my measure, is every nine months or so). Her new EP Negotiaions just dropped and I thought she'd be great to chat with—not only because of what she's currently up to, but because she got started in an era that feels both vastly different and, as she points out, a little more than similar to what's going on in the music industry now. It was a great convo, check it out:

This new EP takes the sound of AMERICAN GURL and pushes it into new directions. Tell me about putting this one together.
I usually get ideas for records from coming up with a title. I don't really make music unless I know what I'm making, so I'll be doing other projects and randomly be like, "Oh, this is your next project title," and then I'll sit with that for a while and let it roll in my mind before I start thinking visually. A lot of times, I'll get a few different projects in my head at once, and it's a puzzle for me to figure out which one comes first.

This project was an idea that I thought was going to be a record, but when I actually started to work through it, I wasn't sure that I wanted to flesh it out that much. As an EP, I feel like the concept is very tight. For albums, I always want a broader sense of where I can go creatively, visually, and performance-wise. This project came about because I was working on a different record at an artist residency and I had all of these loose ideas and thoughts. I realized that I couldn't go from AMERICAN GURL to the next record that I'm making without the truth in the middle, and I feel like Negotiations is that truth in the middle, processing a lot of what's been going on between AMERICAN GURL and whatever's next.

There's a lot that was unprocessed that needed to be so I could understand what the next chapter is, and that's Negotiations. It's kind of a sister project to Reflections in Real Time—very in its own head, questioning a lot of things outright. It feels a bit colder, even though it's pop, which is why I always knew I wanted this record to come out just coming into spring. Even the vocal deliveries are very hollow and not so emotive, and what we use to process the vocals is coming from that concept—which is, where do we go from here?

All my work is really about questioning systems, but AMERICAN GURL was like, "Okay, do I fit here? Is this what I want anymore?" Negotiations is about sitting with the fact that you're burnt out. What is the way that you want to live your life going forward?

Back in 2016, you talked about the push-and-pull of being an artist online and how that can be really draining. If that was true back then, it's almost doubly true like now. I'm curious to hear you reflect on those feelings and if anything's changed for you in that regard since.
When it comes to having to be public-facing, that's what Negotiations is trying to grapple with. Before, when I was younger, I was like, "I'm not going to—period." I was way more rebellious when I was younger, but I also cared more. The older that I get, I don't put the same weight on everything like I used to. When I was younger, with Reflections, I was putting the same exact weight into a social post that I was putting into a piece of writing or a visual. Negotiations is about scale. For this, you can get this—and do you want that still?

Those are the things I'm grappling with, more than just "technology is bad." I don't think that. It's just really about what you want out of your life. It's an impossible conundrum for artists, because you need the time and space to live and create things that are beautiful and thoughtful—but then you also need to constantly be sharing past work, which doesn't necessarily allow you to move mentally into the next space.

With streaming, people would prefer that you put out music constantly, but to put out music constantly doesn't always give people what they want out of music. It doesn't give you that same beauty that comes from actually sitting with music, and it doesn't allow people to receive music in the way that it's intended, because it forces everyone into this fast-paced system that doesn't allow people to really sit with records the way that they used to, which doesn't give them the same amount of weight—which then makes it harder for the artist to push through.

Personally, I think there are different ways of making the music system work for you, based on what you want. But for me, personally, I don't see it as a working system any longer. I'll still make music, but I don't base my life around the expectations of projects—because, it's like, how am I supposed to do that? It's not like there's millions of dollars being funneled to make this push forward. There aren't covert marketing strategies that are going to allow me to do that, and do I have the stamina for that even if that was the case? Is that actually my goal? It's not for me. I have to tell myself constantly that I'm not in concert with that. I'm creating my own space that's mine. And I don't have to apply all of those same principles to the way that I do work.

Have you ever had moments where you've considered just not making music anymore? The landscape has changed so thoroughly and regularly over the last decade that a lot of really talented people have been very rightfully discouraged from doing so.
For sure. Everybody's like, "I'm quitting, I don't want to do this anymore." That definitely happens to probably everyone. But, for me, there's not a question of if I'll ever stop making music—the question is more, "Will I like actively pursue having my music being seen?" If you're a creative person, you can't not be creative.

I guess what you're asking is if I've ever thought about just leaving the industry, and that's for sure. But the way that I've built my career so far, I don't have to look at it like that. It would always just be a break, versus "I'm never going to do this again." There's so many projects I couldn't do without music. When I think about how I want to explore design, fashion, or films, there are some ideas that really only work musically or performance-wise. I wouldn't want to throw away that whole arm of creativity, so I don't see myself doing that, necessarily. But you can take two years and write a book, or three years and write a feature film. There's other ways to explore that I'm always looking for.

I'm hoping to be more fluid, creatively. But you can get injuries from making art, and if one part of your creative arm is depleting you so much, it's really good to sit with that. For me, part of making Negotiations was sitting with that part of it—what are these things that work and don't work anymore? I don't work with a management team, I don't employ a lot of the normal structures that make up an entertainment structure—and I've done all of those things before, in many different ways, with many different people. But then you're like, "What is making my life easier and what is making my life harder? What's allowing me to continue doing this work?"

Creativity is just all endurance. So much of it is managing your own energy and thoughts about your work—about who you are. That's like the hardest part, at least for me—more than managing money, budgets, creatives that I work with, or creating the work itself. The protection mechanisms have to stay very open to be able to make things that are beautiful and received by people.

One of the reasons why I've wanted to talk to you for a bit is because you came up at a time in which getting recognition in the music media was an effective way to break through to a wider audience. Now, that's much more difficult—but that was a tough time for a lot of people who gained that exposure as well. Reflect on that period of time.
The media landscape was so different. But it might not be that different [now], because there's so many songs that have blown up because of TikTok, which is not that dissimilar from when I first started. The only difference, for me, was that it felt more subculture-based. It felt like it was a bunch of people coming up together around the same ideals. It didn't feel so calculated—but, also, I was much younger, so for someone that's 19 years old and putting songs on TikTok, it might feel pretty much the same where it's like, "I'm just doing this for fun in my bedroom and, wow, you guys like my song." We've seen that happen so many times,

The harder part is the narratives around attention, which can make things feel very hollow. It comes more so from the industry itself than the artist, or sharing the music with people. The language is like, "Okay, you need to do six posts this week for this project to get this amount of engagement." There's no soul in the way that people discuss how to push through, whereas before there was a little bit more levity around what it means to like make art.

For me, it's all about the change from pre-streaming to post-streaming. The amount of social media platforms have expanded so much as well, and each of them require different things, so if you're an artist that doesn't care about that stuff, it's a little bit easier because you can just pay someone else to do it. But I like to be specific. If Apple Music requires something specific, then I'll make it. It just becomes a lot of busy work.

I think I make life a little bit harder for myself because I care about these things. But for the average person, [the industry] might feel the same as it used to. If you're younger—if you're just starting out, or it's your first go—it probably feels probably similar to how it felt when I was younger.

I saw early hip-hop mentioned in the bio. One thing I hear in this EP and AMERICAN GURL is the electronic dance-pop that was very prevalent in indie circles in the 2000s, too. Tell me about how those influences made their way to you.
I'm always searching for this nostalgic feeling about the idea of music, and that comes from the music you heard when you were young. You're looking for that feeling of, "Oh my God, I'm in my bedroom listening with these headphones and I'm 16." You want to make that for someone else, and sometimes it comes out sonically in terms of the styles and palettes that you choose—but also sometimes in the songwriting. The 2000s and 1990s were the eras that I came up in, so that's just the reference bank that I have.

When I turned 18, I moved to New York—that was 2008. So a lot of my reference bank is blog music Santigold, M.I.A., and LCD Soundsystem. I know that people call it indie sleaze now. [Laughs] That whole era was the era that I lived in New York for, so it's really topical in my memory.

When i was a teenager, I searched for music a lot more, so there's this different pocket of my brain that has put more energy and effort towards that music. Also, something else I was talking about with AMERICAN GURL was MTV, television, and radio culture—flipping through different genres of music and how all of them could be pop, but they're all coming at things from a different angle—Nelly, Red Hot Chili Peppers, all of these things could be existing at the same time on the same countdown. That gels your brain in a different way where you're like, "Okay, all of these things can be smashed on top of each other and that's doable, workable, and fine." That's like the approach for me: Which rabbit do I want to pull out of the hat?

For me, AMERICAN GURL was my McDonald's version of an album—a little bit more on-the-nose and bubblegum-y, like a hamburger and french fries. The song structures are pretty typical. But for this record, given that it's about reprogramming the body and mind, I didn't want to go the whole AI route. So I was like, "What sonic palette do I employ?" Obviously, we can talk about Daft Punk, and from a Black perspective we could talk about funk and the use of vocoder in that style of music—even West Coast rap. Obviously, I like trip-hop and dance from that time period. I find the different pieces that fit the theme, and I go in those directions.

Miguel is on this record, and he's on the last one too. What's it been like getting him in the mix? What does he add?
It's a relationship that I've had for a long time. I tend to work with people that
work with my producer [Raymond Brady], who's also worked on projects with Miguel, Vince Staples, and Jean Dawson. In the era that we were all working on these things, that was the family that was around.

I tend to work with people that are working adjacently with other friends and that I admire creatively. There's many ways to approach music, and Miguel cares about not just making profitable music, but making music that actually has deeper purpose and meaning. I really appreciate his collaboration, because he's always open, and he's so much bigger than me in terms of reach but he's always down for whatever the song requires.

That's what I like about collaborating with other people. I work with Vince a bunch, and I like being in service to his ideas. It's not about, "How can I get more on this song? How can I get a bigger feature? How can I use this to navigate my own career?" It's about, "What do you want me to say?" I really cherish those creative relationships because they're places where you can play in a different space and in a way that's maybe not what you would've naturally done, but it makes something come together.

I saw that you went to school in Glen Rock, New Jersey for a bit.
That's online? That's funny.

It's on your Wikipedia. I grew up in Ridgewood, right next door to Glen Rock. What are your memories of Northern New Jersey?
I went to elementary school there from five until whenever elementary school. My family was from around that area, so my family are Jersey people. I randomly happened to be born in Florida and then we moved there, so that time period was integral for me. I think I was one of two Black students in the school. There was no "gifted" program, and they kind of created one for me. So for the first couple of years, I was essentially homeschooled within the school and jumping between different classes.

I always felt this displacement. I was connected to people, but then I also wasn't. It built a very specific way of looking at life. I think I looked at it like how you'd look at animals in a zoo. That's how I took this distance from my classmates. I wasn't involved, I wasn't a part of things—I was kind of separated. That distance is still the way that I look at life, a bit. I like to be in big, beautiful rooms of cool, talented, and artistic people—but I'm still looking from this distance. That's the approach that I take to my art.

It's interesting that you asked me [about Glen Rock], because that's kind of where that was built. I had so much time to myself because I was going on these buses back and forth, walking the hallways alone, going from class to class—and I was so shy when I was younger, so it was so much observing and wanting to do everything right, wanting to be worthy of all of this work that everyone was doing to make sure that I was able to have this different kind of education. I put a lot of pressure on myself, and that's probably where my semi-perfectionistic streak started, and now I'm almost undoing of a lot of that. Negotiations is what happens when you don't when you keep trying to be and do everything perfectly. That just doesn't work for long, and now I'm in mid-30s and I'm like, "Well, what are the parts of this identity that I can take away?"

I don't know if you guys were able to do this at your school, but when we were in fourth grade, during lunch we got to walk into town by ourselves.

We had that in high school in Ridgewood, yeah.
I thought was the coolest thing when I was a fourth grader. You got to go to lunch and eat pizza and get sour belts. In what other town—what other school—did they let you leave and they're like, "They're just gonna come back and nothing's gonna happen to these children?" They're just gonna walk by themselves into this cute and perfect town and go get their little snacks and come back in 30 minutes.

I loved that as a young person, because I was like, "Wow, I have so much autonomy and independence." But I would say that was my favorite part of the whole situation. Otherwise...I thought it was a beautiful town, an idyllic place to grow up, but being an other in that scenario, it was a lot of pressure.