Ashnikko confirmed as much as final month’s Brit Awards coated in boils.
The creepy getup was skin-tight, translucent latex wrapped round her physique like an alien membrane whereas egg sacs (her offspring) scattered down her again and hips like tumors. The outfit was tied along with her iconic blue hair minimize right into a bob, moist and draped down.
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This was the primary followers had heard from Ashnikko in a couple of 12 months. Following the viral success of her 2020 monitor “Daisy” and 2021 mixtape, Demidevil, the agent of chaos took a while for themself. Now, they’re again within the strangest approach doable. “The girls that get it, get it,” the singer-songwriter smiles over Zoom.
The period begins with their newest single, “You Make Me Sick!,” an aggravated expulsion of a deadbeat-shaped toxin from the physique. The complete monitor is on the prime of Ashnikko’s lungs, an exhilarating reclamation of bodily autonomy, one thing the 27-year-old didn’t have “in a few romantic relationships and also as a child. It was good to create my own personal rage room to break plates.”
“Screaming,” they mirror, “I find it much more effective than violence.”
Sorry, trypophobes: The music video performs with the identical visible themes from Ashnikko’s crimson carpet look. “I think I have the opposite of trypophobia. I have trypophelia. I love little growths and holes and coral and barnacles and blackheads and pus. Maybe not pus, actually. I take back pus, but growths! I’m really obsessed with fractals and geometry and nature. It all tied into my love for that.”
The level of getting a physique, Ashnikko believes, is to make use of it as a canvas. Or maybe as a portal. And with the announcement of her debut studio album, Weedkiller (due June 2), she’s able to dive in and get a little bit messy. “I’m using the fantastical world as a medium to tell a very personal story.”
Weedkiller is, they clarify, a concept album set within the wreckage of a destroyed civilization. Ashnikko is a surviving faerie, and “the weedkiller itself is an enemy with many faces,” a killer machine that “represents an ecological collapse and an ecological enemy. It represents my rapist. It represents the heartbreak that I felt as a child. I’ve put all of these enemies’ faces on this one fantastical robot enemy called the weed killer, this biomatter-eating robot, because all it does is consume with no remorse.” A terrific ecological metaphor for environmental destruction, she says.
Enter “Worms.” The music video for his or her newest single drops us instantly right into a Mad-Max-meets-Bjork’s “Army Of Me” apocalyptic universe. A mini-Ashnikko imprisoned behind the tooth of a monster head dips out and in of chaos and choreography alongside hell-bound demons whereas the life-size one drives a teeth-lined monster truck.
It’s a nihilistic feast of the senses. “I’m in complete denial that the world has ended and that I’m alone in this world.” Nothing issues, she tells herself. “Everything’s fine. I’m riding through the desert with a sword on my back in a monster truck, and I want to go fast.” But there’s a seed of grief, too.
The album explores varied catharses, and Ashnikko oscillates between screaming on the prime of her lungs and seductive siren calls. It’s a 13-song curler coaster experience between feelings and genres that includes two collaborations: Daniela Lalita joins “Super Soaker,” and Ethel Cain is featured on the devastatingly stunning monitor “Dying Star.”
Their recording session for the latter was one among their favorites, Ashnikko says. “A huge thing for me on this album is to only work with people that make me feel joyful and comfortable.” She’s finished the “100 million pop sessions” with hit songwriters and Billboard Hot 100 makers. Now, she is aware of what she prioritizes in collaborators. “I feel like I’m incredibly sensitive to someone who’s not funny. If someone has a bad sense of humor, I don’t think I can make music with them. I’ve done the pop circuit; it didn’t work for me.”
The tune with Cain, undeniably, and maybe surprisingly to some, works. Ashnikko fell in love with the “American Teenager” singer after seeing her carry out on the Hollywood Cemetery (how becoming?). “She makes you feel hollow but in a good way. When I listen to her music, I feel the sublime. I feel small but in a very safe way, like a speck of dust in the universe.”
“Dying Star” is a Greek tragedy of a tune about leaving an abusive relationship behind for one thing gentle and welcoming, set in Ashnikko’s fantasy world. An intergalactic traveler leaves a dying planet “in search of a new one because their planet is dead, or it has been attacked, or it’s overrun with weeds or an invasive species. It’s not suitable for life anymore, so they are on the search for a planet to take them in.”
It’s a softer facet we haven’t seen a lot from Ashnikko, and so they’re excited to disclose an increasing number of bits of herself. They’ve been romantically linked to fellow singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, and Ashnikko says their relationship impressed these “joyful, sexy, loving songs that feel like I’m getting just as much as I’m giving.”
And as Ashnikko explores their gender identification, gone are the songs about silly boys and sass pancakes. “Maybe in the past, my music has been a little girl boss,” they mirror, mulling over outdated emotions of embarrassment and anger for a few of their earlier eras, “but now,” she says, “I’ve circled back around, and I have a lot of love for my younger self. It just felt like more of a caricature and more fantastical. I know that this album is very fantastical, but I feel as though I am speaking from a more personal place. All my references and inspirations are coming out in this album. It’s a culmination of everything that has taught me how to make music and how to make visual art.”
They choose their phrases rigorously as we wade into the realm of gender, way more protecting over how they talk about their identification than music. “I’m from an incredibly conservative, super homophobic patriarchal place in North Carolina [where] my surroundings and immediate family reflected those views. It wasn’t an incredibly free space for me to explore anything to do with my sexual orientation or my gender identity. I didn’t even know that being nonbinary was an option until I was 18.”
It was constraining, and Ashnikko doesn’t like being boxed in. They just lately up to date their pronouns to she/they on Instagram. “I identify with womanhood, but I feel more than that. I’m still trying to figure that out,” she explains.
But don’t get her incorrect. There are nonetheless some tracks for the ladies — particularly the queer ones. “Gooey like a gusher/Tony Hawk, I’m doing tricks until my tongue hurt,” she sings in “Don’t Look At It.” “Oouie, in the gutter/I can’t help that I want to be titty smothered.” Ashnikko performed that tune for her mother. “She was just like, deep sigh, ‘Jesus Christ.’” Ashnikko laughs, “I know I won there.”
No one else is placing out music like this: That’s what makes Ashnikko so thrilling. It’s harmful but laced with bubblegum. It’s attractive with a razor-sharp edge. It’s punk and steel, but additionally pop and screamo and lure. It’s all of them but additionally not one of the above?
“I don’t even know what genre I would put this album in,” she admits. It is smart. After all, their influences embrace Bjork, M.I.A., Gwen Stefani, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott, Paramore, and Kelis. “All of those artists have not been confined to one genre,” they are saying. “Kelis was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna scream on this song, and y’all are going to deal with it.’ Nicki Minaj was like, ‘I’m going to write a complete pop song, and y’all are going to deal with it.’”
So, now, Ashnikko’s brewing up a pop-metal-rap-emo album that might be chaotic, foolish, tragic, empowering, offended and delightful — and the world’s simply going to must cope with it.
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