Queer alt-pop princess KiNG MALA is ready to rip out throats with her debut album And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing. But this is more than just an album. It’s a 12-track possession story wrapped in a Brutalist-Baroque nightmare. It’s been described as a 17th-century Italian feminist painting drenched in latex, the soft glow of a confessional flickering over leather gloves, which should grab the attention of all the freaky girlies out there.
With this album, KiNG MALA becomes her own kind of final girl who’s ready to be both the hero and the monster, burning down everything that stands in her way. Plus, each track is paired with a horror-themed visual that embodies a specific subgenre, from found footage to supernatural horror.
We spoke with KiNG MALA about her horror-themed debut album, finding catharsis through music, and our shared love of Ethel Cain.
DC: Can you tell me about the vibe and the idea behind your debut album And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing (which is such a good album title, by the way)?
KiNG MALA: I knew I wanted to do a really conceptual thing for the debut album. I wanted to start from scratch and have it be one concise story. Before we started writing, my producer asked me, “What are you interrogating? What do you want this project to be about? What do you want it to say? What do you want it to communicate to your listeners? What do you want it to interrogate for you personally?”
I told him that I wanted it to be a story about power and this eternal struggle I feel as a woman. I feel like I have to choose between my power and my humanity. I can’t be both. I can’t be a powerful, successful, cold, guarded, calculated person and also be a woman who deserves love, nurturing, care, and a family. I can’t be in love and be powerful; I can’t be soft and powerful; I can’t be friendly and powerful. So that was sort of the crux of the discussion I wanted this project to be.
At the same time, I also wanted it to be horror-inspired. I knew I wanted it to be really dark, and I think we talked for maybe 15 hours and I was finally like, “Oh, I want it to be a possession story where there’s this entity that comes in and offers our main character power that she wants in exchange for her body and her humanity. And thus, the project was born.
DC: I love that because it’s true. I feel like so often we talk about female empowerment, but then we’re also not allowed to be multiple things at once.
KM: Exactly.
DC: When did your love of horror start? Where did that come from? Has it been a lifelong love of yours?
KM: I do feel like it’s been a lifelong love. I blame Courage the Cowardly Dog.
DC: Yes, though, because, oh my God, the scariest television show for children!
KM: I was obsessed with it as a kid, and my mom thought I was a freak. My mom was like, “Why are you watching that show again?” It’s so dark and creepy and unsettling. All of the villains are always so unsettlingly weird. So I think that’s where my love of creepy shit came from. I’m not a huge fan of gore, and I’m not a huge fan of slashers necessarily. I love unsettling creep as shit makes you feel dark and scared and uncomfortable when it’s over. And that’s Courage the Cowardly Dog.
DC: It’s baby’s first look at nihilism or existentialism.
KM: It’s so funny. Exactly. So much anxiety.
DC: And I think that’s why I loved it. I was an anxious child, as I’m sure most of us were.
KM: Oh, deeply, deeply anxious.
DC: As a found footage freak, I’m obsessed with the video for “FUN!”, which very much has Blair Witch vibes to it. So, I wanted to specifically know about your love of found footage and The Blair Witch Project.
KM: My creative director, her name is Marley Hall. She is incredible. Also a huge horror freak. There’s actually a video for every single song on the album. We knew we wanted there to be a lot of nods to some of our favorite horror films, and The Blair Witch Project was one of them. “FUN!” was a moment for us to be like, “Here’s a little nod to this style of horror.”
There are nods to a bunch of different kinds of horror throughout the album visuals, but Marley is a huge fan of found footage. She was like, “I want it to feel super anxiety-inducing and fast-paced.” There are other videos we made that are more like Robert Eggers-style—soft, slow, zoom out, scary silhouettes and stuff. For this song, we felt like it would be perfect to reference found footage because it is so fast-paced. It is so chaotic, it feels very personal.
So that was the goal with this one. But I love The Blair Witch Project. It was one of the first scary movies I saw. I’m a really big fan of the Never Show the Monster type beat. Is The Descent a found footage film? I don’t remember.
DC: It’s not fully found footage, but some of the scariest moments are. When they see the monster for the first time, it’s when she’s holding the camera. So a lot of the scary moments are through the handheld camera.
KM: Yes, yes. I love that. That was something we really wanted to go for in the “FUN!” video. There was a moment where I was like, “I want to just hold the camera and cry and laugh.”
The best parts of found footage are when our characters are nose to the camera flipping out—they have nothing left. There’s nobody left. It’s usually just the one character left and they’re holding the camera as if it is their last lifeline. So we did a bunch of shots like that.
DC: That sounds like so much fun though, getting to play with these forms and with your music. That’s such a cool marriage of your loves.
KM: Yes. Oh my gosh, so fun. I’ve been feeling so creatively and personally fulfilled because it is so much shit I love. I don’t know if a lot of artists get to intersect a bunch of their different interests like that often. It’s really exciting.
DC: So you see this album as a full story. Is KiNG MALA the main character, or is this a sub-persona within KiNG MALA?
KM: It’s interesting because yes and no, so the characters of this album are not me, but they are me. They’re not KiNG MALA, but they are KiNG MALA, if that makes sense.
They are their own characters and they have no names, no genders. But it’s very much like the experience of a femme-presenting person. The entire conversation was meant to be an interrogation of this project because it is sort of an alter ego. It’s a way for me to tap into my power and to experience a sort of confidence and security that I don’t necessarily feel on a personal level. So it’s me and KiNG MALA, but we don’t call them that. Throughout this whole process, we called them our narrator and our entity.
DC: So you talked about complicating confidence, but would you say that there’s any catharsis to be had from making this album and its visuals?
KM: Oh, absolutely. It’s been so cathartic. I think there was a lot of moments in making the music itself that I was like, “Oh shit.” I was expressing something I didn’t realize I needed to express and touching on things that I never had the words to talk about. But because I had these characters to express these stories for my own personal life, there is a lot of personal catharsis in the music itself and then making the visuals. I knew I wanted to use a personal touch for some of the songs. The last song on the album is a very, very personal song about my experience with assault. For that visualizer, I was like, “I want it to be just a bed in the desert.”
DC: I just got chills. As someone who has also been assaulted, that image in my head… That’s amazing.
KM: It’s just you in this moment, forever in your head. So making things like that, incredibly cathartic, I finally got to turn this horrific situation that I can barely talk about into art that means something to me and that gives me a sense of getting my power back. So that was very cool.
DC: That’s so cool. But did it also emotionally kick your ass a little, too?
KM: Oh yeah, definitely. It was such an intense process. Writing the album was almost a full year of every single day, all day, every day, eating, sleeping, breathing it. I knew the visuals would be really intense, and we shot all 12 videos over two weeks, so it was a lot.
DC: Two weeks??
KM: Yeah, it was pretty crazy. My creative director is literally a genius. The way she set it up, it didn’t even feel that exhausting because she was so on top of everything. That’s something that I think made the process so incredible. Shootung one music video, usually I’m down for the count for a week. I hate being perceived. I hate seeing myself on camera.
But with these, she was so caring and thoughtful in the way that she organized just the entire shoot that it was actually not as exhausting as I’m sure it would’ve been otherwise. But I also spent a lot of time preparing for it. I trained physically and mentally for six months.
DC: A good producer in any field is what you need.
KM: That’s literally the lesson of this entire album. My musical producer: incredible, life-changing. My visual, creative director and producer: incredible, life-changing. Nothing is possible without them, and she’s also just a horror fan, femme, man-hater, fucking survivor, an incredible person. She was a perfect fit for this project. It was the first time I had a female creative director, and it was life-changing. There are so many things that I’m so used to being the only person thinking about during the process. And she was like, “No, I’ve thought about this and ten more things that you didn’t even think about that we’re going to take care of.” She’s also a Capricorn, so that helps.
DC: Having a team of women around you, I feel like, makes it easier. There’s a little less of an emotional burden on your shoulders of trying to explain these experiences to people.
KM: It makes such a difference, and it means a lot to be understood by your creative team. It’s incredible.
DC: Would you ever want to score a horror movie?
KM: I mean, I am so obsessed with the Suspiria (2018) score that Thom Yorke did.
DC: It’s so beautiful. It’s so good.
KM: It’s so perfect for that movie. It’s so freaky but gorgeous. That was actually a bit of an inspo for some of the songs on my album as well. But I would love to score a horror movie that would be so sick. I would love to do that someday. My executive producer, Dan, is also a huge film and score fan. We would have such a good time doing something like that. Okay,
I’ve realized in this process that my strength definitely lies in writing characters and from the perspective of characters. That really allows me to spread my fucking wings and fly and be free. So I am definitely very interested in that.
DC: Are you an Ethel Cain girlie?
KM: Of course. Oh my God, I’m obsessed with her. She posted about the Preacher’s Daughter vinyl, and I immediately pre-ordered it. I can’t wait to get it.
DC: Have you listened to the new album, though?
KM: I have. In fact, I was sitting on my couch, reading my nihilistic fucking historical nonfiction fiction book about the way we are destroying the world and listening to that album. This is a perfect soundtrack to just diving into some deep, dark shit.
DC: I was drawing comparisons between the two of you just with the storytelling and the way y’all create characters in such interesting ways. Obviously very different music, but I love artists who aren’t afraid to create stories with their albums.
KM: Thank you. I was super inspired by Preacher’s Daughter in that way. I love that record and I’ve always wanted to make a conceptual record in the same way, so it was a huge inspiration. What she did with her character and her music, I want to do in my way.
DC: My last question for you was pretty simple. What’s the scariest movie you’ve seen recently?
KM: Oh, incredible question. I’ve watched it literally four or five times, and I recently watched it again with some friends. It’s The Ritual, it’s on Netflix. I love that movie. Something about it really hits me. I don’t know why. I think it’s the middle of the forest. It has my favorite scary movie scream.
DC: Oh, really? I need to rewatch.
KM: Oh, it’s so good. I’ve seen it so many times because when I saw it, I was like, “This is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen.” I thought about it for weeks, and I also had nightmares, which is very, very rare for me. This was in college, so this was probably five or six years ago, but I’ve watched it a bunch since. I watched it twice when I was home over Christmas because my siblings hadn’t seen it, and my dad hadn’t seen it.
Now I watch it with my full chest because I’ve seen it so many times and it’s so beautiful and frightening. It’s so sad.
DC: Also, the best monster design. It just hits all these emotional beats in crazy ways.
KM: It’s also one of those horror movies where there’s no relief. Usually, there’s a bit of humor, there’s a bit of like, “Oh, everything’s okay at first.” We’re in the pretty house with the perfect family, and then they start hearing the footsteps, and it all starts going downhill. But with this movie, it’s bleak, and then it just continues to get darker and darker and darker until the end.
I feel like horror has gotten really cunty, which such a good way to describe what I’m obsessed with. Horror is in its bag right now!
And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing from KiNG MALA is out on May 2, 2025!
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