Katy Kirby: The Best of What’s Next

Katy Kirby is from everywhere and nowhere specific, and she’s intentionally vague about it. When she put out her debut album, Cool Dry Place, in 2021 through Keeled Scales, a label based in Austin—a 45-minute drive southeast from her hometown of Spicewood, where she grew up in an evangelical household and was homeschooled and taught to embrace the covenants of her faith—Kirby happened to be in the midst of a year-long stint in the city.

Before then she took to Nashville, enrolling at Belmont College (which she lovingly calls “Vanderbilt for dumb kids who want to play music” or “Berklee for kids who are not that good at music theory”) to study songwriting but quitting and immediately becoming an English major—only to spend a decade in the city, despite never really falling in love with the idea of becoming a native. “I was planning on moving out of there within a year for the entire time I was there,” Kirby explains. Fast-forward to a few years ago, and the 28-year-old has settled into a life in Brooklyn, her home-base for the release of her sophomore record, Blue Raspberry.

I’ve been drawn to Kirby’s work ever since I first heard Cool Dry Place, a debut record that made enough waves to land her on ANTI-’s roster and vault her from being an opening act on—according to my dear friend from NYC—every bill in town to headlining her own US tour with fellow Paste favorite Allegra Kreiger this spring. I suppose I hold a biased solidarity with any and all fellow English/writing majors who have elected to roam this world blissfully unqualified to do anything else. Within minutes of jumping on Zoom with Kirby, we start talking about Victorian novelist (and certified drag) Thomas Hardy, and that is the hallmark of a kismet if I’ve ever stumbled into one. “My girlfriend started reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles out loud to me recently and I was like, ‘Damn, is this guy okay?’” she explains.

Kirby is a living, breathing “Wait, wasn’t she already a Best of What’s Next?” artist. I tell a friend of mine I’m writing about her for the column, to which she responds with that exact question. It makes sense; Kirby played our 20th anniversary SXSW party in 2022 and, in 2016, even recorded a Daytrotter session with us—five years before she even made a full record of her own. But, as shocking as it is that Paste did not crown her as such two years ago upon the release of Cool Dry Place, I prefer her being the Best of What’s Next now, mere weeks after releasing one of the most well-written indie albums in a long while: Blue Raspberry.

Blue Rapsberry is a product of Kirby’s interests; as a kid, she had an affinity for dense prose (and still does), hence her tolerance for Victorian lit. “I really do enjoy a sentence that is creaking under its own weight,” she muses, pointing to a duality of texts—Sherlock Holmes and the Bible—as formative placeholders, not music, in her own embrace of language as not just as an art form, but a way of emotionally articulating the world around her. There were a lot of dead British men and Lord of the Rings re-reads and, because her parents weren’t much tuned into secular music, Kirby didn’t hear a lot of it until she was in middle school. But she’s more than made up for it since then, conjuring an amalgam of Andy Shauf, Clairo and Leonard Cohen, the latter of which caught some well-placed nods on Cool Dry Place.

Blue Raspberry wound up becoming a much more personal record than Kirby initially intended it to be. Even a closing track like “Table,” her self-proclaimed “thematic outlier” on the tracklist and a cathartic, breezy song she’s been performing live for more than two years, revels in Kirby playing around with proverb and verse, commenting on the “God is always” mantra she was raised around. The Lane Rodges-directed video that accompanies it, too, finds Kirby—donning religious garb and smashing a table to bits with a pickaxe—wailing through a “light-hearted leftover” from her “God-haunted past life” as producer and co-writer Logan Chung’s distorted, roaring riffs echo with reckless abandon beneath her. “He pours a pool of salt in my hand, showing me how I ought to throw a little bit over the surface like rain,” she sings. “On the wicked and righteous, the laymen and saints.”

“Growing up knowing God is always watching, even after you set that aside—and I’ve heard this from other people who are ex-evangelical or ex-Christian or ex-anything—the way you were raised and the things you were told not to do, or the ways you were told not be, whether you try to shed them or not, they do tend to follow you around a little bit,” Kirby says. “The sense that God is watching—or that someone is watching—is hard to shake. It’s really weird, running around and feeling like God is watching. I still remember that feeling. It’s not bad, necessarily. But it is weird and sometimes it is bad. Even now, though I don’t feel like God is watching me all the time, at some subconscious level, I still do. And I still catch myself behaving that way or feeling that way.”

Kirby is quick to admit that growing up in an evangelical household is definitely baked into her creative work, but she was spared from a lot of the problematic, brutal compartments of it—and “Table” is an immediate portrait of her ability to look beyond the pale and welcome the color of it. “The evangelism I grew up in did have some stuff that I treasure in it,” Kirby continues. “I was trying to write a song that honored both of those things. The stuff that feels really stupid and gross that I am aggressively uninterested in and me figuring out which parts of the Christian tradition I don’t intend to throw out.” That duality of embrace versus curiosity was a potent theme on Cool Dry Place, as Kirby used songs like “Peppermint” and “Eyelids” to better convey the complexities of human connection and the preciousness of intimacy, worship, cosmic portals and cherishment.

Religious imagery crops up here and there on Blue Raspberry, but not as vividly or consistently as you might expect from someone with Kirby’s past. There’s a line in “Drop Dead” that I particularly like, though—one that goes “there’s no virgin territory for a body like hers, a body of water,” as if Kirby is playing her hand at telegraphing an innocence versus redemption arc. Some writers are hesitant to fall into that world, or even critique it or pull themes from it in order to better understand what life or desire exists beyond it, but it’s a chemistry that’s ingrained in Kirby’s DNA—though she does etch a mark of intentionality on not letting it become an always necessary vessel for which she tells her stories of gestures and of love.

“I’ve tried really hard, at certain points, to not let those parts come out to play, not anchor myself from certain reference points that feel tied to religion but, I don’t know, that was before I even knew that I had a brain separate from other people’s brains, before I was even necessarily aware of my own selfhood,” she continues. “That was the imagery and language and frameworks that I was dealing with, so I really did try, for a decade, to set it aside. And that was good but, also, it’s just in there. I can’t make it go away without artificially adopting some other framework through which to talk about these things that we’ve all used religion to talk about since the beginning of time.”

On Cool Dry Place, much of the instrumentation found Kirby and her bandmates personifying very textbook indie rock, very guitar-forward palettes. But on Blue Raspberry, she’s instead leaning into dense, dynamic, orchestral set pieces. It sounds like a natural progression, sonically, but she’s deliberate in her compositional upscaling, building out a record that is finely detailed and grows more and more complex with every note—an apt wallpapering for an album so vibrantly ensconced by intimacy. “I wanted these songs to sound romantic, as well as be about romance in a way that I hadn’t really trafficked in before,” Kirby says. “It really felt like what the songs demanded of me, they felt dramatic and traditionally romantic in a way that made me a little squeamish at times, honestly. So, I thought the best way to do that would be to not fight it, because I’ve definitely tried to self-consciously take prettier songs and make them edgier. I never know exactly what my motivation is but, sometimes, I do get self-conscious about how pretty certain songs are—or how feminine, even. Or how romantic they sound. [On Blue Raspberry], I was trying to not be afraid of the ways that some of those songs were ballads and they were about love.”

Blue Raspberry is a personal documentation of a first vulnerable, queer romance. But it is in this storytelling that Kirby zooms out of her own inclinations to write too much and crafts a sense of goofy normality entangled with her own sexuality. It’s refreshing and beautiful and timeless, and it will mean so much to so many for a long time. Though the album is named after a beloved gas station slushie flavor, Blue Raspberry is full of strange, heady vignettes of two women falling in love with each over and over—and Kirby sets each chapter aglow with a euphoric sense of grounded place-settings paired with chaotic, surreal imagery. “Her eyes burn white as styrofoam, right into me,” she muses on the title track. “She’s sugarcane split open, she’s a jaw about to sing, and she’s shaking little packets before she pours ‘em in her drink”; “Face framed by hoodie like an oyster in a shell, and your eyes are rolling at me as a pair of angry pearls,” she sings on “Cubic Zirconia.” “You’re the prettiest mermaid in the souvenir shop, but if you’re coming home this late you know you’d better be drunk.”

Kirby went from writing songs that were imaginative about what queer love might feel like to singing songs that are so viscerally about that very thing becoming real and, in turn, Blue Raspberry finds her reveling in orchestral signposts—adopting small symphonies and sensual messiness made tangible through a musicality that flutters between a strikingly precise minimalism and a radical, ornate grandiosity. It’s a product of Kirby, in her personal life, feeling a newfound, canonical resonance for her own identity. She wanted Blue Raspberry to feel sweeping and bigger and mushier, because she wanted the album to sound in-dialogue with the rest of what the world thinks of as love songs with a capital L. “I never would have guessed that being in love and being queer, for the first time, would make all of these really traditional tropes about love feel more real to me than ever,” she explains.

“I’d been in heterosexual relationships before and they were nice and romantic, but they weren’t quite as romantic or didn’t feel quite as big in a way that made me understand the romantic canon more than I had previously. I thought that was weird. Or, it felt weird to me at the time, how freaking traditional and old-fashioned falling in love with this girl felt,” Kirby continues. “I don’t know, exactly, what I imagined instead, but I thought that that was lovely. It feels really cool to get all of that when the ooey-gooey romantic canon, as it were, is, like, exclusively heterosexual territory, historically. It felt like I wound up these ooey-gooey romantic songs that fit into that canon. I wanted them to sound like they belonged in the canon, or could. That idea was fun to me. It’s weird when stuff suddenly makes sense past the age of 18. It happens less and less and then you’re like, ‘Woah!’”

The centerpiece of Blue Raspberry is “Party of the Century,” a song that, when I first listened to it, fully put me on my ass. Since it hit streaming late last year, I’ve been struggling to fully articulate why or how it’s a landmark, emotive, grieving and miraculous song—pensive and sublime and harmonic, with a largely acoustic arrangement packed with violin and folkloric percussion. Kirby co-wrote it with Christian Lee Hutson and, across just two-and-a-half minutes, the two musicians piece together observations of harrowing and deeply, deeply human and universal fears they’d each heard many people profess about not just living at this moment in history, but about being vaguely aware enough to have an appropriate amount of despair about the future while also feeling okay with being lost going towards it.

The lines at the beginning, where Kirby sings “You think it’s ethically suspicious to bring someone into a world like this. But you’ve got the best smile anyone could ask to inherit and, baby, I know you’re so good with kids,” speak affectionately about the human instinct to have a child with someone you love, while the end thoughts, “That makes you like a sunset, that makes you like a snowstorm, that makes you like a drought, that makes you like a war,” are tiny, affirming and collective mementos poking out of environmental and conscious hopelessness. “To feel ill-equipped to meet those but also really, really love your friends and care deeply about the people around you and want to be good to them, I think that it probably feels really, really acute right now, at this moment in history—the wanting to care for people you love and being distracted and obsessed with how much you love them and, also, at a loss for addressing the conditions of despair,” Kirby contends.

Across Blue Raspberry, the phrase “Why wouldn’t that be enough?” resurfaces like a buoying motif, as Kirby openly reflects on previous relationships that had obvious holes in them. Her first queer romance, the one that shotgunned her into this album, began lovingly yet ended painfully—with Kirby being left for somebody else—and those natural consequences thus turn into fragmentation, as she takes thoughts from her notes and fashions them into a portrait of a recent lifetime that unfurls cosmically. She repeats lines, impales herself with contradiction, zooms in and out of close-mic’d guitars and a featherlight falsetto and omits the soul-searching from Cool Dry Place for a newfound espousing of her own deserved, bittersweet and clumsy happiness.

This recurring idea of artificial flavors and substances like blue raspberries and cubic zirconia, too—Kirby defends the cherish-ability of them abstractly as she sees them in others. “Getting to hold a part of someone for a brief period of time and feeling like there was something true there, no matter how partial or how flawed—why wouldn’t that be enough?,” she says. “And, I don’t know, especially when history is littered with romantic relationships that are brought about by convenience or cultural expectations, I guess, to be in my first queer relationship and to get to see someone and be seen by someone, it felt like—it feels like—a worthy pursuit, even if it doesn’t go half as well as you hoped it would.”

It can be difficult to avoid knee-jerk praise when it comes to speaking or writing about Blue Raspberry. There’s ample brilliance burrowed far beneath the surface-level context of all 11 songs, and it’s the kind of lyrical level-up you would expect from someone whose work stands out like a composite, nuanced sketch of a still-unfurling self-benevolence—or like a richly autobiographical yet sublimely accessible portrait of someone very willingly ready to reckon with all of life’s supremely devastating, joyous and momentous curveballs. It’s a perfect storm pulled from a thesaurus; a long-winded, roundabout way of gushing over yourself and the people around you.

Blue Raspberry is overwritten and better off because of it. Sometimes, when you fall in love, language is never quite enough. For Katy Kirby, this time, language is everything. Here, romance is a “carpet bomb of estrogen” and “the sunset of your sunburned skin.” Love is so mythical and unfathomably sweet, like a flavor that doesn’t actually exist. Good neighbors make good fences, and yearning, praise and kindness are embedded with uncertainty. But what is certain is that Katy Kirby is a unique addition to the Best of What’s Next cohort—in that, if this music thing doesn’t work out for her, she could easily become a world-class novelist or a literature professor. Maybe she’ll settle for all of the above.

Watch Katy Kirby perform at the Paste Party in Austin in 2022 below.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.