KILA - Wishful Thinking
Image by: Tom Wilson @thetomwilsonexperiment
Written by: Tom Wilson – Sense Music Media | Monday 07 February 2022
Combining the pulverising heaviness of deathcore with the glitching ultra-bass of trap and a scream that sounds like lost souls shrieking out of a cracked pipe in the bowels of hell, Wishful Thinking is the absolutely harrowing new single from artist, DJ, producer and grown-up emo kid KILA (pronounced “Kee-la”). She spoke to SENSE from her home in Newcastle.
I’m thirty-six years old, so emo became massive just as I was leaving school, and I found myself wondering the other day – what happened to all the emo girls? And then I saw your IG profile and realised: they’re still around, they just got taller.
[Laughs] Pretty much, yep. Still inspired by it. I just carried it with me!
What were the bands that lit up your teenage years?
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE … From there I got into the real scene kid stuff, so like I SEE STARS back in the day, BREATHE CAROLINA back when they did the heavy stuff. Full scene kid! And then I got into AMITY and that kind of stuff as it grew, but I think the first stuff was when someone showed me MY CHEM and I was like, “This is it!” Back before The Black Parade album, the old school.
[I remember] all of a sudden, emo had exploded, and I remember being thoroughly perplexed … All of these bands had sentences for band names, and everyone was dressing strangely. I was a nu metal kid, man! What happened to dreadlocks and eyebrow rings?
Myspace happened. [Laughs]
What was your Myspace handle back in the day?
My actual name is Melissa, and everybody called me “Lissa”, so I think it was “Lissarrr” with Rs and “rawr” on the end! [Laughs] About as bad as it gets! I was a little eleven-year-old emo kid!
My first exposure to you was Wishful Thinking. Firstly, it’s ludicrously heavy … it sounds like it was played with a fifteen-string guitar or something that hasn’t even been invented yet. Is this all music you’ve composed yourself?
So I do it all myself, and most of it is starting with a basic sample … You buy a pack of riffs, and then I chop and change it to suit whatever the vibe is, and then I can program guitars pretty well to match the riff, and then an electronic drum kit. It’s all produced laptop-wise until I go lay vocals on it. It’s lots of manipulation of one sample and taking it from there, and adding the EDM bits in there. Just putting it all together myself, basically.
You’ve been very active releasing singles over the last few years. Do you have any plans – any desire, even – to put together an LP or an EP? Or is that just not where people are at these days?
Yeah, I’ve noticed that things have changed around albums and stuff. I feel like people don’t have the attention span for it anymore, or the want to delve into an artist’s other tracks … I noticed that most bands just kind of pump out a lot of singles. I’ve got 40+ unreleased tracks and growing at the moment, so just basically trying to get one out every three weeks, and then still want to do a little EP probably around April/May just to get something new there. But yeah, I couldn’t imagine doing an album currently in this era of streaming services. I have a lot of music, so I’m just trying to keep it consistent and keep pumping stuff out … People aren’t buying CDs anymore, so it’s not like back in the day where I’d love to hear the songs that didn’t make the cut as singles and that kind of thing … It’s all about what’s on Spotify. I just noticed that my favourite bands haven’t really released albums in a few years, and I know even bands like AMITY which I enjoy have just been throwing out four-track EPs instead of long albums. Times are changing! [Laughs]
“I find it a massive catharsis, just to get it out and then process it.”
There are a lot of references to mental health and vulnerability in your lyrics. To what extent does your art act as therapy?
Yeah, everyone who listens to it is like, “Are you all good?” … For me, it’s a massive release. Writing it and getting it out of my head and into words, and trying to work out what’s really going on – I find it a massive catharsis, just to get it out and then process it. Also the beauty of it is that I can then turn it into an art that people can enjoy, but also that people can relate to, because I know that’s something that’s big for me. Most of the music I listen to, like the bands we’ve talked about, they really write [music that is] mental health or life-related, and I always listen to that stuff for obviously good music, but then also to feel that feeling that other people are going through stuff too, and not feel alone in my mental health journey. For me, it’s getting it all out there, and also turning it into something that I can share. It’s a release, and a pretty good feeling to do something with it, I guess. It’s definitely a different kind of therapy, I guess! [Laughs]
If you could collaborate with anyone, who would it be, and why?
It’s going to sound silly, but THE VERONICAS are high up there. [Laughs] Back in the same era as the Myspace days, my first concert was seeing them with SHORT STACK and METRO STATION. I was real young, and one of them does really awesome metal vocals. They’re usually in the background of some of their tracks, and you don’t really notice it, but live she gets down on her knees and screams her little heart out. That was the first song I’d heard like that, especially from women, and I was real young and was like, “That’s sick!” [Laughs] I’d love to collab with them and produce something heavier, and then add the pop elements and bring out her screams and throw mine in there. Weirdly enough, that’s probably at the top of my list of dream collabs.
Who are some front-women who have inspired you, either with their vocals, or just the way they conduct themselves onstage?
They’re relatively new, but there’s a band called REDHOOK…
Yeeeesss!
They let me open for their show – this was pre-COVID – and it was my first ever KILA vocal set, because I had done DJ kind of sets before. They let me open for them, but I’d been a fan of theirs for a few years … I just reckon they’re insane. You can’t beat Emmy’s live vocals – she’s just running around, jumping around, just so energetic. She doesn’t miss a beat. Emmy from REDHOOK is a legend! [Laughs]
We’ve talked about the music that has inspired you. What are some other pieces of art – film, television, art – that you’ve seen that’s inspired you?
Horror movies, for sure. You’ve probably heard in a lot of the tracks, if it’s not mental health or dark-related, it’s usually like horror … I’m not so much a gore fan, but the horror movies that get your brain going. Like Nightmare on Elm Street and that kind of stuff, yeah. [I’m] Definitely a massive horror movie fan. I’ll watch it to help me go to sleep, whereas people would be on the edge of their seat. [Laughs] Any kind of art like that, definitely horror. Anything and everything. I paint, and I try to do all sorts of other forms of art, and it’s usually like ripped up scrapbooks … I’ll do paintings and then find wires and cut it through the paintings and cut and slash them and that kind of thing, but I’d usually do that stuff while listening to music. That kind of art, in different forms … But yeah, mostly it’s horror! [Laughs]
Wishful Thinking is out now.