A new year is the natural point to kick off something fresh and exciting, and that’s exactly how it’s turned out for Kid Wave.
The project of Swede Lea Emmery, after dropping a debut album back in 2015, she spent the majority of the next year stateside, including touring alongside The Shins after an invitation from James Mercer.
Writing while on the road, new cut ‘Twenty-Four’ is the first track to arrive from that batch of new material. Produced by Lea and Lewis Pesacov (Fidlar, Beach House) in her home studio in Echo Park, California, you can check it out below.
“I wrote it in my somewhat temporary bedroom in Chinatown in LA, on my way back to the UK because I had run out of money for food or rent at that point,” Lea explains. “I was saving up for a plane ticket working in the café next door and wrote this at some point in-between shifts. The song kind of wrote itself and even if the demo sounded very rough I knew exactly how it’d end up. We kept the somewhat robotic naïve drumbeat in the intro (it’s actually a Garageband loop as that’s what I use for demos). For a second I felt a bit worried about it sounding so different from my previous stuff, but I’m young and have accepted that I change and will change. I’m a song person and just never think in genres, I do whatever feels right and I think I’m getting better and better at it too.
“Twenty-Four is a pretty accurate excerpt from my life last year. I think I struggle a bit being young, I like the idea of having my shit together and some stability, but I definitely don’t. I never really know where I want to be and never have. I wait for things to unravel, but they never do because by the time they might’ve I’ve already gone looked for trouble somewhere else – like moving away, starting a new project, going on tour or falling in love with someone who’s just as lost as me. I feel like I suffer an unusual amount of growing pains but it just isn’t easy for anyone is it. The new stuff is mainly about love because that’s something I’ve been struggling with too I guess. I think I’ve put myself through enough situations and emotions to fill a life worth of albums by now. I was only in LA for a little while but I found it a great place for “on the border of out of order” life experiences. There’s always some big house that belongs to someone who’s not in the country, but is house sat by somebody you met in an uber pool on your way back home where you can play drums and listen to records all night.”
Kid Wave is set to play London’s Birthdays later this month on 26th January.