AJT: Were those songs related to the ones now at all?
MK: Not really. I mean, you can pick apart some elements in them that are similar, but you can tell I’m afraid of my own voice. It passes as singing but I’m not really singing. It didn’t really click for me until I saw a Deathproof video. It was just very unapologetic. It made me realise that I have so many fucking problems and it’s actually been a very hard time for me for a long time and I don’t know why I’m acting like I need to be… Whatever. Seeing that gave me a lot of permission to be honest with myself and not feel bad about it. Then all these songs just started coming out of me and people understood what I was saying. I put out Beautiful People [2020] as the first single and I remember I was writing it at home and felt so guilty about being that honest with myself, it felt selfish or something because it’s like, I had friends and people who love me, but in general, I felt very isolated. I felt very pushed aside and I felt really upset about a lot of things. I didn’t show it to anybody [at first]. But then when I did put it out, it ended up being a more honest representation of how I was feeling and people were immediately very receptive to that.

AJT: That authenticity certainly comes through in your music. You then moved from LA to New York, in the album notes it mentions how you became somewhat lost in the city’s nightlife. I’m curious to know more about that, and how that influenced the album.
MK: I don’t know. It just felt that in order to do certain things I’d never done before, I needed to become a new person. I went there on a one-way ticket after living in LA for a year or two. I got a call to sign a record deal out in New York and I’d literally just lost my place in LA ten minutes before I got this phone call. I went [to New York] and the very first thing was, I’d never spoken to anybody who had as much power as the people I was speaking to and like, I didn’t really know anything about the industry and basically I just didn’t trust anybody. I got like 30k for my first [record] deal and I felt so guilty. I was giving it away to a bunch of people back home and recklessly spending it and buying drugs and drinking a ton and just freaking out over the pressure I was putting on myself. I didn’t realise that there are so many degrees of success and there are millions of artists I’ve never heard of who are making a living and doing these things. It’s not this make-or-break thing – I didn’t understand that at the time. I got to a point where I’d been there for almost a year and I’d lost all the money from my record deal. I was just really messed up on drinking and drugs. All of this came crashing down on me and I didn’t have the album out, it wasn’t even done or anything. I just couldn’t let it be that way. I was like, that’s just the worst story ever, “He got his record deal, he went there and guess what, he didn’t make the record. He lost all the money, got a drug problem.” I fucked up and I couldn’t handle it, but I was like, I’m going to make the record and do what I came to do. Then basically the moment I finished the record, Jagjaguwar was like, “We want to sign you,” and that was insane. My life was back, I got a second chance.

AJT: The album is incredible, I love how it starts with a scream, that immediate burst of emotion. Can you take me through the thinking behind that?
MK: I don’t really remember. I think it’s one of those things where you’re listening to the song and then you just hear it in there, then we did it. I like the idea of the album starting out that way – that’s the first sound to pull you into it. There’s a lot of acoustic and softer songwriting on this project and I wanted to figure out the right way to mix everything up where it’s more of a journey.

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