When conditions are so extreme and the spiral of injustices only ever moves downward, what is required is a kind of savagery, a defiance, an uncontrollable energy that be neither be bound nor repressed. This is an attitude adhered to by Georgian five piece and an ethos that is championed by vocalist KT in their pursuit for pure musical rebellion. A call to arms, an awakening and a reminder that evil never rests and its guises can be many. There latest album raises to the fore topics, sentiments and ideals that are currently being smothered and dulled down, and they are doing it in the loudest possible manner.
Hi KT and thank you for taking the time to speak with us at Musicology.
Firstly, congratulations on the record. Truly a powerful album and one that speaks directly from your soul. There is a rawness to your work, an open wound that uses the aid of music to provide some relief. Given your life experiences that birthed this record, what specifically have you drawn upon that is reflected across the fiery thirteen tracks?
My own experience… But my own experience is shared amongst more than just me, if that makes sense. So in the end, it kind of ends up being a shared experience that we can all relate to…all of our experiences.
Well, I’d say ‘Tired’, ‘Forgotten Token’, ‘Nowhere’ and ‘Kin’ are definitely recent. I guess ‘Fried’ would really kind of date back to the earlier times of chaotic movements and thoughts. But once again… a lot of the same shit that I’ve been talking about, I’m still talking about, because things are unchanged. It’s like, nothing really is in the past, not in the future, it’s just quite… consistent.
A record can often contain a lifetime’s worth of experiences distilled into a single body of work, or sometimes it is a very brief period, snap frozen in time. Across the album, which tracks indicate recent times and which of those hark back to many years ago?
All these songs have grown, it means something a little bit more the more I listen to it. I think that happens with every song, though, not gonna lie.
Looking back across the record, have all the sentiments and experiences that formed the basis of the album remained the same for you or have they been evolving in some ways that perhaps do not represent the same things as they once did?
Well, they usually come to me with an instrumental of some sort, and then I just write to what they got, and however it’s making me feel at that time.
Recording out in the desert at Sonic Ranch Studio with Ty Segall in production, it was a rapid process, which in part was due to your collective tightness, but what elements did Ty bring to the table that bear his indelible fingerprints?
We just kind of lock in when we’re with Ty, our work ethic and our maturity, even, you know? It’s not like he had to scowl at us to do it. We’re just like… out of respect, he just brings that out of us, for sure.
It is with young blood that the insurgency needed to destabilize the institutionalized hegemony is required. Do you feel the weight of the good fight you engage in and the pressure to carry others forward, or conversely, an uplift by the pursuit to address the constant ills that face you?
There is, there is weight, there is pressure, but kind of feeling helpless in that factor, given that things are getting progressively worse the louder we get, for some reason.
But it also is uplifting being able to do this and be around like-minded folks in this scene and community.
I guess it’s a little bit of both. It’s a balance to maintain.
What do you see as the greatest social threats right now, and how are they influencing the ways you are approaching your craft?
The freedom of speech threat is definitely one of the scariest ones, because once you shut us up you shut us out at the same time. I can’t even keep up with what Trump is doing at this point.
Every threat is a social threat, you know, us even being able to watch a genocide on fucking TikTok… there’s too many. There’s too many threats. All of them are social threats.
With the accelerated divisions in American society and widening disparity between bipartisanship, how do you see music being a mode through which some cohesiveness can be achieved?
I guess in a sense music has been a way to unify people, it always has, you know? But we’re not so much about like, kumbaya and shit. We’re kind of done with that. There is power in having a space for people to release. For people who have like-minded feelings, and not everyone is welcome, you know? I don’t know…We’re not so much concerned with bipartisanship.
Being a change maker yourself and inspiring others, in turn, what words of wisdom have been spoken to you that really resonated and affected your approach to music and, for that matter life?
All the matriarchs of my family’s sat me down and told me that this world was not made for me, for real. But that I can’t allow it to destroy my spirit, my soul, my power, my will, my beauty, my intelligence, and everything that is beautiful within me and around me. And know they gonna keep trying every day, but… We’re gonna make sure it don’t happen.
