Next Wave #1204: Willow Kayne

Despite the pressures of the music industry, Willow Kayne has found her own rhythm. Early in her career, Willow felt a need to “say something important with my music,” she confesses. “That got overwhelming at times because I didn’t know where I wanted to be or what I wanted to say.” But she’s since learned that music is more about pioneering something fresh rather than conforming to expectations. “I used to go into a session like, ‘Let’s make a jungle track mixed with something cinematic.” But that approach eventually felt limiting. “Now, I don’t think about it as much. I just let the songs come together naturally.”

Raised in the West Country, Willow’s influences span jungle music to Gorillaz, M.I.A. and Portishead. “Pretty much everything I love is English,” she reflects, noting that her sound wasn’t consciously shaped by these influences but they’ve always been present, as they were the soundtracks of her childhood car rides with her mum. “I still want my music to feel the way I felt listening to those tracks as a kid.” Yet, Willow’s music is anything but nostalgic. She’s laser-focused on pushing things forward, admitting, “If I could change the direction pop goes in, even just a little, I think that’d be wicked,” an idea that has helped her embrace a more authentic, laid-back approach to her music.

This dizzying sense of forward motion is epitomised on her new project ‘The Zenosyne’, which centres on the disorienting experience of growing older. “All my songs used to be like ‘fuck you, I’ll do what I want,’ but now they’re more about the scary side of adulting,” she jokes. “It’s so funny because I think about that all the time.” The title track is inspired by a single word she discovered on a vocabulary app that renders this feeling. “It’s about realising how time speeds up, and suddenly I’m like, ‘What the fuck, this adult stuff is scary!’ When did life start speeding up so much?”

In Willow’s music, there’s always been a sense of catching up with yourself, of trying to hold still the moments that slip by. But pop, for her, now seems to offer a kind of escape from this tightening loop – a release that stretches wide across a vast landscape of sound, while holding on to her own voice, against anyone else’s expectation.

“I made a weird promise to myself in the mirror,” she reveals. “I was like, ‘I’m only going to put out stuff I love, no matter how long it takes.”

—

—