James Blake | King Princess
MIKAELA STRAUS IS LAUGHING HER HEAD OFF; it just occurred to the musician better known as King Princess that her sombre, romantic ballads are “best consumed stoned and sad.”
“Oh my god, write that!” she joyously demands, her glee deepening as she repeats the phrase: “‘Best consumed stoned and sad!’ I just wrote your article.”
The moment neatly encapsulates everything that’s made King Princess into a buzzy cult favourite: Straus is as animated and charismatic in person — sitting cross-legged on a sofa and vaping — as she is on stage and on social media, but she takes her songcraft as seriously as your life. Like most 20-year-olds — and more justifiably than most — she’s supremely self-assured.
You can hear it in her debut EP, Make My Bed, a classic-sounding mix of huge, reverb-soaked piano-and-guitar balladry and the kind of lovelorn lyricism that, in lines like “Tell me why my gods look like you, and tell me why it’s wrong,” evokes Leonard Cohen and Lorde in equal measure.
Listening to King Princess’s sophisticated songwriting, it’s easy forget how young she is. But Straus has been making music since she was seven, having spent her formative years in and around her father’s home-based professional recording studio, Mission Sound. At 11, she turned down a recording contract with Virgin Records.
“I really understood the concept of holding off as a kid, because I watched people get eviscerated by labels in my years observing musicians in the studio. It was like ‘Okay, fuck all of that.’”
Holding off gave a teenaged Straus time to figure out what it was that she wanted to explore in her music.
“I began to seek out and enjoy content that was queer, and I was curating shit I was watching and reading to be queer only. It became obvious to me that my life’s work was to make that same content, but in my medium.”
Just one EP and two one-off singles (including a remake of Fiona Apple’s “I Know,” featuring Apple on vocals) into her career, Straus has established a young audience that see themselves in her explicitly queer songs and aesthetic.
Her recent Toronto show was a celebration of friendship, love, youth and queerness: at the front, Straus was inundated with bras and weed offerings; at the back, the venue’s expansive floor provided a space for young couples to slow-dance.
Half of her set list was composed of new songs that will appear on her full-length debut: “A body of work that provides an experience,” she says. “You’re crying, you’re laughing.” Asked about it, Straus squeals with excitement, then turns solemn again.
“Pop music has never been a genre,” she explains of her medium. “It’s what’s popular. And that’s what I’m trying to get at. It can move the pendulum, it can create change, but it has to be good. It has to be good.”
“I watched people get eviscerated by [record] labels. I was like ‘Okay, fuck all of that.’”