Kinlaw – Spit
Last month, Kinlaw announced her new album gut ccheck, which will be released on 3/21 on Bayonet Records, and shared its first single “HARD CUT” along with its accompanying video. The album is the follow up to her 2021 debut The Tipping Scale.
Her new album, gut ccheck, is a sharp and thrilling alloy of pop, electronica, trap, and industrial music that creates a new horizon for art pop that she built from motion, to breath, to sound, to song. Today, she is sharing the album’s second single, a track called “SPIT,” which arrives with a video created with Caroline Polachek, Eartheater, and 070 Shake collaborator 91Rules.
“Almost every time I dealt with anger around language and writing, my fix was to move,” she explains. Kinlaw writes in a non traditional way because it is intuitive to her. “I don’t trust traditional ways of working,” she says, “I hold on fiercely to what feels good to me, what makes me feel awake.”
From this, gut ccheck becomes an album that has its genesis in perspective, in interrogating what a moment or a feeling or an opinion can become. Using this process, Kinlaw worked with producer/collaborator Carlos Hernandez (Ava Luna, Carlos Truly) to build the sonic landscape of the album.
“‘SPIT’ is one of the songs where the influence of my choreography is most palpable, it’s breathy and yearning at 110%.
Kinlaw says of the track:
“As someone who came into music making as a vocalist first, I have the impulse to always hold everything in my voice. It was just how I started to make music. For so long, I felt this responsibility to give all information by ways my voice would move, soar, or show intensity. And there’s something so rewarding for me at this stage, in practicing restraint. But with this song, it’s also a different approach. It’s about letting this feedback be the front-runner. It’s chaotic. It’s shrill, it’s uncontrollable.”
“Spit starts off with guitar feedback. Controlled feedback is a theme in this one. Feedback can’t be controlled. Those two words don’t make a hell of a lot of sense next to each other, but it’s captured chaos that builds the foundation of this track.”
She adds of the video:
“You should have seen this motion control camera! Part of this process was working alongside parameters of the equipment, so I wouldn’t get smashed in the face by the lens. It really heightened the stakes during each take. I wanted the shots to feel fierce and free, but needed to stay extremely specially aware while this camera soared all around my face and body. Wild experience.”
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