Okay Kaya is the project of Kaya Wilkins, a Norwegian singer/songwriter/model/actor whose unflinching insights cut all the deeper thanks to her knowing wit and smoky vocals. On 2018's Both and 2020's
Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, she explores issues like mental illness, health care, and sexual fluidity with fearless vulnerability.
Raised in Nesoddtangen, a village outside of Oslo, Wilkins grew up with a brother who played in black metal bands and a mother who whose record collection became the foundation of her musical education. Early on, she was more captivated by studying dance than making music, but that changed in her late teens, when she moved to New York to work as a model. Her first songs -- which she wrote on a guitar she got when she was 13 -- were musical diary entries that allowed her to explore her deepest thoughts with darkly witty lyrics and delicate acoustic melodies.
Wilkins began releasing her music as
Okay Kaya in 2015, when the label Hot Charity issued the singles "Damn, Gravity" and "Clenched Teeth." In 2017, she collaborated with the Danish producer Vera and with
King Krule on
The Ooz track "Slush Puppy." That year, she also appeared in her first film, Joachim Trier's Thelma. The following year,
Okay Kaya's debut album Both arrived on Wilkins' own Heavy Body label; she recorded the album in her Brooklyn home studio and co-produced it with
Porches'
Aaron Maine.
Both's acclaim led Wilkins to sign with Jagjaguwar in 2019, a deal she commemorated with a velvety cover of
Cher's "Believe." For
Okay Kaya's cathartic second album
Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, Wilkins worked with co-producers
Jacob Portrait and
John Caroll Kirby. Jagjaguwar released the album in January 2020. ~ Heather Phares