COVER STORY | King Princess: Part-Time Woman, Full-Time Icon

“What about your attitude?” I go on. “Does that change?”

“I think I would have voiced it very differently. I’m 26 now and I’m not a drug addict. Well, I am, but I’m a recovering drug addict. I’m not a 19-year-old with access to money and power. I’m not screaming at people anymore.”

Everything post-Cheap Queen has been educational for Straus, who, three records in, is still very much figuring out her own voice. Each release, from my vantage, has been a lesson in not being so precious. Drifting through urbane, erotic, and swaggering passages of the pop and glam-rock pantheon with songs that confront unhappiness, sex, androgyny, and tragedy, the veil of caution that King Princess operates under, it seems, has only gotten thinner on Girl Violence, which Straus attributes to her recent role in Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers—acting being a medium she considers to be out of her comfort zone yet “symbiotic with music.” “There’s so much transfer that can be learned, I think, from being on set and playing a role and investigating a character to writing music,” she elaborates. “I left that experience being way sillier and way less precious.”

Going back into the studio to finish Girl Violence after filming Nine Perfect Strangers, Straus became something of a “Gumby” and offers no further context on what that means. Instead, she tangents: “I’m not insecure about putting my feelings out there. I just want to say exactly what I want to say, however troubling and personal that is. This is how I’ve always done it, but that acting experience was a really great reminder to let it go and try stuff. Do 30 takes! Some are shit. It helps you take yourself a lot less seriously.” In jest, I argue that doing 30 takes isn’t economical if you’re, say, recording to tape. “Oh, I do not record to tape, honey,” Straus digs back. “I get it, it’s beautiful. I use tape as an outboard piece of gear, but I am not a tape girl, mama.” She mentions Tommy Brenneck—the Dap-Kings guitarist who helped mix “1950”—as somebody who does everything on tape: “It’s an art form, you know? I grew up with ProTools, so I’m spoiled.”

We’re reaching a point in music where newer artists—iPad baby alumnus, so to speak—got into music because GarageBand was a preset app on their phones and tablets. Straus tinkered there until she got her hands on Ableton, which she considers her version of “playing videogames.” But there’s something to be said about the autonomy of self-recording, which Straus fought to have early on. The next step, she wagers, was being able to man a studio herself. “It’s a muscle and a skill and a language. I never wanted to be hindered by not being able to do something. That just drove me fucking crazy, the thought of not being able to do it myself. That’s the only way I can actually step away from the computer, when I know I can do it. I can be like, ‘You man it tonight,’ because I did the work to learn how to fucking use all of this shit, so I can be competent and explore on my own.”

So Straus got to write Girl Violence as an independent artist. Instead of responding to executive oversight, she returned to a Hold On Baby track like “Too Bad,” which is her, Ethan Gruska, Dave Hamelin, and Shawn Everett “popping the fuck off,” and let its recurring augments of synth patches, guitar tones, and ennui without filter tug at her. “My favorite thing to do is look back at something I did and go, ‘Wow, I started an idea here, but there’s more we can learn from it. Let’s elaborate on it.’” She worked with producers like Jacob Portrait, who’s “deeply indie,” and Aire Atlantica, who’s “dialed into the pop formula.” Though, on paper, the trio don’t so obviously gel, Portrait and Atlantic helped Straus execute the unorthodox while chasing the accessibility of the ultramodern.

With how much of a memoir King Princess is, it’s not unsurprising that, when asked where she has to go after finishing an album like Girl Violence, Straus doesn’t hesitate to say, “I go to the club with my homies.” The biggest thing she’s learned in her first decade of making music, she expounds, is getting her friends in on it, too. She regales a story about smoking a blunt and watching Dave Eggar get up to a second violin on a 300-year-old cello for “Origin Story.” “My best friend was there for that,” she beams. “That’s a memory, and now it’s embedded in the music. And when I listen to it, I think about the joints and the nights at bars and playing the music for my friends. I included my community in the making of it. That was a huge game-changer for me, just being like, ‘I am not going to go into solitude. I’m not going to lean introverted. I’m going to let my music be introverted and I’m going to let my person be extroverted.”

Straus has worked with the likes of Aaron Dessner, Justin Vernon, the late Taylor Hawkins, Josh Tillman, Rob Moose, Fousheé, Homer Steinweiss, and the xx’s Romy Croft, just to name a few. Collaboration vibrates in the King Princess nucleus, especially on Girl Violence, in Portrait and Atlantica’s cross-album programming and well-placed cameos, like Big Thief’s James Krivchenia’s snare rat-a-tatting in the backdrop of “RIP KP,” or IDLES’ Joe Talbot lending vocals to “Say What You Will.” “I like to be the worst person in the room,” Straus confidently admits. “That’s my happy place. The way that you get better is by being around people who are better than you. I’ve felt this with music, with acting, with everything. I like to be a student, and every time we’ve had a collaboration on a song, it’s been somebody who undeniably adds something I cannot. Father John Misty? He plays Ringo Starr-impersonator drums like nobody’s fucking business. He was perfect for [‘Ain’t Together’].”

She grew up around musicians, especially the old-school studio rats at her dad’s place, Mission Sound. They’re the musicians who taught her how to play, the background vocalists who taught her how to sing. “I got to spend time around people who were, like, 20 feet from stardom,” she remembers. “These aren’t the front-facing people. These are the people who do the bitch work and do it perfectly. My dad is a recording engineer, that’s like being a mechanic. It’s not a glitzy and glammy job. It’s not being a producer. You’re wiring the studio together for somebody, doing the manual labor that goes into making music.” Making her records at Mission Sound, Straus says, is a challenge in itself. “If I turned out shitty music in there, my dad would be reading me to filth. How do I do that studio justice? That room is alive. Because it was a part of my childhood, the pressure is there. I don’t play it safe there.”

STRAUS HOLDS A DEEP LOVE for Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 romance novel The Price of Salt (though you might better recognize it by its republished 1990 title, Carol), and Girl Violence, despite the suggestive bedlam of its title, is ecstatic with queer happy endings and a humorous, self-aware cycle of lesbian drama not unlike what capstones Highsmith’s writing. The Price of Salt informed “1950” and returned when Straus wrote “Jaime” and “RIP KP.” An empowered tone revealed itself, and Girl Violence became an album about “jokingly naming the thing that has taken away your power, to take away its power.” However dark the material gets, a laugh is nearby to even shit out. And Straus goes as far as recognizing her own part in the chaos on the title track, singing, “I guess it’s true love, because it truly fucks with me” before declaring that “not everybody loves like this.” “I’m lucky to be somebody who feels good,” she says, “even though it’s fucking excruciating and I need to get checked into a psych-ward.”

Not enough musicians care about being dramatic or coming unglued in their art. You can only hear so many strummy, droll singer-songwriter types sing the same phrases in the same cadences before you want to put a gun in your mouth. Everyone seems too afraid of being sincere because they’re afraid of being cringe. But Straus owns her gooey, sexy, messy gravitas. “Unfortunately for everyone, I am deranged,” she affirms. “This whole campaign has been surrounded by gorgeous strippers. I like the kooky bananas. Silliness is my area of expertise, and thank God, because you can be silly and earnest. They’re not exclusive. The silliness allows you to be earnest.”

I ask her what makes a song honest. “It means that you can listen back to it in a couple years and still take something from it,” she replies. “The goal is to not make music that sounds like other people’s music, and the goal is to not make music that sounds like it’s current. It’s not interesting to me at all. I try to just tunnel vision into what I’m doing. I don’t care what anybody else is doing. I wanted a strip club in a women’s restroom, so I got one. It came from my fucked-up brain, which has the answers of what I need to do. I just need to trust it. I’ve spent time not trusting it, and I’m just not interested in doing that anymore.”

In an effort to trust her fucked-up brain, Straus hosts a queer costume party in East Williamsburg called Bazongas and recently “dressed as Lord Voldemort with a vagina.”

“Are we certain, though,” I ask her, “that Lord Voldemort didn’t have a vagina?”

“He had big coochie,” she says. “Thick camel toe, coochie lips. I had them shade around my coochie with an airbursh to give extra definition.”

“So it was almost in 3-D.”

“I was in the suit while my taint was being airbrushed.”

“How long were you in the makeup chair for Nine Perfect Strangers?”

“Less than an hour.”

Straus’ mom, who lives in Hawaii now and was also at that Bazongas party, “was disturbed” by the Voldemort costume but loved it. She and Straus’ friends even concluded that the musician had never looked so at peace. And for Halloween last year, Straus dressed up as a slutty Xenomorph, which also doubled as a birthday present to herself. How did her mom feel about that one? “All her gay friends love everything I do and all the straights are confused,” she says. “But she rides for me, she rides for the crazy. She’s posted my titties.” And, without skipping a beat, she pulls out her phone and shows me the aftermath of a recent caper, in which she painted her entire body red for a shoot. “The theme,” she reveals, “was me being painted red.”

Though one of music’s greatest currencies, the rock star, is nearly extinct, I do think Straus is among the remaining few. She’s handsome, blasé, and foul-mouthed; she’s impossibly kind yet dangerously perceptive. There are a million singer-songwriters and there are a million people downloading software onto their laptops and hooking mics up to them. Everyone’s a producer when any room can be a studio. But there’s only one King Princess, and her persona means something to so many—to the point where an entire culture is in dire need of more of her. “Being able to play instruments and rock out will have its moment in the sun,” she says. “We’re in a bit of a zone where we’re desperately looking for pop stardom, whatever that means. We’re in an age of a lot of pop stars and not a lot of rock stars. But you’ve seen it. Every couple years, it switches on. I think the tides turn with music very quickly.” The criteria for being a rock star, she tells me, involves being “able to play.” “Hopefully, that becomes a cornerstone of being an artist again,” she elaborates. “I think you should have to be able to play that instrument. It doesn’t matter which, or how poorly, but you have to be able to play one. You could play a tambourine, but you have to play one.”

“So vocalists are out?” I ask.

“There’s singers, and then there’s artists. Not to be salty, I just think it’s facts. I would say I’m less of a singer and more of a musician.”

“Well, you can play, like, 40 instruments.”

“I’m also an obsessive compulsive demon. That’s what “OCD” stands for.”

GIRL VIOLENCE IS, as Straus puts it, a “breaking up with my life” album that she wrote while picturing the first three rows of her concerts, because those are not just “her people,” but ride-or-dies who’ve taught her “what it means to be an advocate for them.” “There’s a lot of music out there, and there’s a lot of queer music that sits on the surface, and I hope to be a place of therapy for people,” she continues. “I want to be the backdrop to people’s heartbreaks and their relationships and their situationships and their greatest losses and their greatest wins. I feel like this record is that.” What else this record is about, you can argue, is Straus’ “deeply emotional, spiritual, and spooky” curiosity towards women.

True to the carnal imagery that haunts the album’s queer purgatory, “Girls” is a mirage of part-Stax, part-Janis soul and vocal pop. A promenade of pleasure awaits in Straus’ singing, especially when her arena posture and a swell of guitars, which could fill an entire city, crest over the heart-pounding chorus. “Girls” is the best King Princess song yet (“Cry Cry Cry” is right there at #2), and a historical obliteration of what traditions surround girlhood, though Straus is reluctant to call herself an “active participant” in womanhood. “I feel more like an observer, and that in-between is both excruciating and, if mastered, all powerful,” she elaborates. “Femininity is a performance, and it’s part of my performance. But it’s also not the entirety of my being.”

Straus, a part-time, non-card-carrying woman who writes from the perspective of someone who is, isn’t a part of the binary. But Girl Violence, in its nakedest glory, is encompassing all feminine people and their ability. “Even just a drop of femininity gives you the power to create emotional chaos,” she says. “Having that inside of yourself gives you this great power and responsibility to either commit or not commit emotional warfare. I’ve done it. I’ve been the receiver of it. I’ve been the perpetrator of it. I’ve been the victim of it. This is our lives. We are chaos. Lesbians and non-binary, femme people are chaos. It’s rooted in our history of watching ourselves be tragic. All of our media is tragedy and we have continued the cycle and learned and adapted through it.” Straus’ part in that is transient. Every time she writes about women it’s voyeuristic. When she writes about herself as a woman, it’s voyeuristic. “There is a total split down the middle of my soul with my gender.”

And though her rock merits have stratified her into something of a phenom, Straus is a self-appointed graduate of the “John Waters School of Ridiculousness” and a current pupil in the “Pee-wee Herman School of Clownery.” Upon the release of Girl Violence, there will be an opportunity for her fans to go to queer tattoo shops across the country and get big-titted, cunt-serving cherries tattooed on them. If you haven’t caught on by now: Straus is gay without apology, painted as red as the cities she visits. But what I’m actually trying to say is: She’s an icon and knows it. But to her, that means being funny and unapologetically herself—two virtues she’s had in spades, even after the hellish deaths that still consume the retrospect of Hold On Baby. “Smiling and having fun through the pain is what we do best, as queer people—finding comedy in tragedy,” she says. “That’s the lane I know about. It makes sense to me, and I want to be that for people. If I can be a show where people can come and feel fucking safe and meet friends and laugh and cry and fucking party, I’ve done my job.”

I suggest the obvious, that safety for queer and trans people is rarer now than ever, admitting that there’s too much frustration and not enough places to put any of it. (At the time I’m writing this, the Texas Senate has just passed an anti-trans bill, which Governor Greg Abbott is expected to sign into law.) But a King Princess concert, I reckon, might be as good a place as any to find proof that the possibilities for us to love and be loved are not just woven into the freedoms we’ve advocated for, but that they cannot come apart. “It’s our responsibility, as queer artists, to remind queer kids that we are irreplaceable. They desperately want to get rid of us. But they can’t, because we make all the good art,” Straus says. “It will ruin everything. You will have no good interior design, no good music, no good movies, and no good fashion. You will be miserable. As much as I can just make people remember and feel that, I’m chilling.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.