“It feels liberating,” Kučka tells Apple Music of writing and releasing her debut album, out some six years after her last solo release. “I could write about anything on my mind without worrying about, ‘Oh, is it too personal? Are people going to get it?’ With an album, you can delve into topics that are less obvious, but it’ll make sense once you wrap it all up.” The electronic producer and singer born Laura Jane Lowther found fame while living in Perth from both her own releases (a self-titled 2012 EP and its 2015 follow-up, Unconditional) and collaborations with artists like Flume, Vince Staples, A$AP Rocky, and Baauer. But those collabs started leading to requests to work on more pop-leaning material that she wasn’t fully comfortable writing. “It’s such an art to write that type of stuff, and I just don’t think I'm very good at it,” she says. “I’d go into these sessions and I’d really try, but I wasn’t having much fun.” Since then, she moved to LA, got married, and found her feet as an artist—all at once. The result is an immersive, personal album as compelling lyrically as it is production-wise. “People now understand the world I live in as an artist,” she says. Here, Kučka talks through each track on her long-awaited debut.
“Wrestling”
“I had this idea of the title of the album. It’s the word that would tie everything together. I had this awkward situation where I started seeing my now-wife. I was talking to my nan about it and I didn't expect her to be so shocked. But the cool thing was that she caught herself, called me back and was like, ‘Whoa, I just really upset you, didn't I? I'm sorry, I didn't mean to judge you.’ Basically I could see her brain moving and it inspired the lyrics to this track. I could see the way she’d judged me but caught herself—and I realized I needed to be able to do that as well.”
“Contemplation”
“Vegyn [producer] sent the melodic section to me. I was feeling like I needed some time out, I needed to go to nature or something, but I was in the studio and far away from nature. So I was like, ‘Okay, how do I create it here?’ The lyrics came out super fast. I basically wrote the whole first half to just Vegyn’s loops and produced everything else around it later on. I just got myself into this little comfortable zone.”
“Drowning”
“I wrote this when I first moved to LA; it’s one of the oldest on the record. I was pretty happy at that point because I had moved there and all of these awesome things had started happening. Then I started to compare it to when I’d previously moved from England to Australia when I was a teenager and had this realization, like, ‘Oh my god, I was so depressed.’ But I was 16, I didn't have much of a good relationship with my parents, and I don't think I had any open discussions about mental health. I feel like I dealt with it way later on—and writing this track was part of that.”
“Ascension”
“This was also inspired by my nan. She’s super wise and has all these one-liners that she'll say, and they just stick with you. I just love how unassuming she is. She’s been a cleaner for her whole life and just a very normal person, but I wanted to translate some of her wisdom.”
“Afterparty”
“I was just playing with this arpeggiator and slowly started detuning it. It sounded like being really fucked up, like that time of the night where you're a bit all over the place but you're really happy. And the samples were phone samples that I had recorded on various occasions and nights out that I'd been on.”
“Joyride”
“I was in the studio and it had been one of those days where I was just banging my head against the wall, trying to finish some heady track that probably never got finished. And I opened a session that was just called ‘Really Good Beats.’ I just used samples from that session and chopped them up. I had a vocal take that didn't really work, so I chopped that up and grooved the track out. I thought it was a nice little breather.”
“Your World”
“I wrote that when me and Dillon had just moved in together. She writes and produces some stuff too, and I feel like it was a cute little flex. We’d gone on our first date to this super cute bar called The Friend, which is all pink and it has a disco ball, it's very prom. I wanted to recreate that in this track, so I just leaned into the prom pop aesthetic and tried to make it really sparkly.”
“Sky Brown”
“I’d started producing this track but didn’t know where to take it lyrically. Then was just on YouTube one day and someone had posted a video of this child, I think she was like four or five at the time, skating, jumping off a bus at one point, just doing all of these crazy things. And I just knew that’s what the track was about.”
“No Good for Me”
“So I was really frustrated with someone, but it wouldn't have been constructive for me to get as angry at them as I was. I remember being in the studio and just wanting to channel it. It definitely worked, because I never ended up needing to have a big confrontation. And sitting down and writing the lyrics was actually more representative of how I felt, rather than some stupid comment that I would’ve ended up regretting.”
“Real”
“I was working with Nosaj Thing quite a bit, and he's just such an amazing producer. I’d go to his place and he’d just open session after session of sick beats. The original track was slightly different, but it was slower and just had such an intimate vibe. It’s encouraging people to live in their heads, and go as far as they can with their daydreams and fantasies.”
“Eternity”
“It’s a strange one because I started the lyrics in about 2015, but I never wrote a chorus until I got to LA. I call it my premonition track. I had all this stuff about riding in a car and being with someone—it’s another really intimate track. But it was weird. I recorded those vocals and then three days later, Dillon's like, ‘Can I drive you somewhere?’ And she drove me up into the mountains. It’s basically about being comfortable with someone and feeling like you're in a little bubble and the world around you is crazy and distant. I hadn’t even completed the track, but after that day I knew how to finish it.”
“Patience”
“I wrote it as a sonic way to help me with insomnia. I’d been having all of these weird health issues, which at the time just didn't add up, and there was a point where I just couldn't sleep. It was the worst. I was exhausted all the time; I couldn't write anything apart from lullabies and stuff like that. So I think the lyrics sound a bit desperate, almost like a prayer.”