Words by Cordelia Lam
It was ’s birthday in July. Freshly 24, she joins from her New York City apartment the morning after her celebrations. “I’m glad we’re talking today!” she laughs. “Every birthday of mine is always so pensive. I’ll just be full of reflections.”
The corner of her apartment she’s dialling in from is lovely. Decorated with ornaments and art, a Monet-hued painting of purples and blues hanging in a golden frame, the space suggests a love of beautiful things, a passion ignited perhaps by her roots as a classical musician. Here in the quiet of her living room, it’s an otherworldly little corner of Kinsley’s own making.
Losing yourself in other worlds is the heartbeat of Kinsley’s upcoming debut album ‘Escaper’, a deeply emotional project borne out of transformational events in the musician’s life over the past year. The concept of realms beyond us isn’t new to Kinsley, though. Her music, a fusion of classical elegance and contemporary audacity, has always sounded kind of otherworldly, flung out of space yet effortlessly insistent on its own reality.
Kinsley trained as a classical pianist and violinist from childhood, going on to study music theory at Columbia University. She began sharing self-written and produced music online, finding herself propelled into a blossoming music career in 2021 when her single ‘The King’ went unexpectedly viral. “Doing music properly alongside school became very hard to balance by the end,” Kinsley recalls. She embraced the challenge wholeheartedly, though, releasing an EP every year since.
“The beauty of song-making really comes from carving out space in the music”
Those records, from ‘The King’ to her more recent ‘Ascension’ and ‘Cypress’, orbited a central fascination with being young and feeling the expanse of the world around you. “Before we get older / Let’s do everything… You’re still young and you’re still free,” she urged on ‘The King’. “I’ve always had such an issue with the passage of time,” she muses. “So much of my music has been about feeling stuck inside a very specific decade but also not wanting to grow up.”
On ‘Escaper’, though, that preoccupation with holding time in place is replaced now by a great sense of presence, the music anchored in a more full-bodied, lived-in quality as Kinsley steps into the new reality of adulthood. “Our lives were only a blimp / Of some good thing then, and whatever it is now,” Kinsley sings, backed by a chorus of violin strings, on album opener ‘Last Time We Never Meet Again’. “These days, I’m thinking more about who I want to be in each moment rather than fighting what’s meant to happen,” she says.
But last year, her reality cracked. A good friend passed away, throwing Kinsley into a “strange and heavy period of grief and loss”. She tells NME: “Until then, I’d had the sort of lucky life where those things hadn’t really hit me as a human yet. And this was the year that they did.” Around the same time, another close friendship of Kinsley’s also came to an end for different reasons. She remembers having “terrifying” dreams that year: people who had passed away over the course of her life would visit her in sleep, asking her to bring them back into the realm of the living.
“Escapism became the most natural survival instinct,” she shares. “I wanted to transcend normal life, become someone else… just not have to work through the loss of a person, the ‘zero-sum’ feeling of suddenly losing so much love in my life. I found myself completely alone in this imagined world between ends and beginnings.” She pauses for a moment. “I was actually thinking about this. My friend who passed away – I was always younger than her. But yesterday, on my birthday, I reached an age past her. That’s really hard to reconcile.”
If Kinsley’s journey into that imagined place were a storybook, the first section of ‘Escaper’ would be the ‘once upon a time’, songs like ‘Last Time We Never Meet Again’, ‘Realms’ and ‘Glint’ embodying the “huge, optimistic embrace” that escapism can promise in one’s state of desperation. Kinsley and co-producer John Congleton deployed shimmering rains of synth on those opening tracks, creating the soundscape of “a magical forest, an oasis, the place of no return”. “To me, synths have always represented a world outside of reality,” explains Kinsley. “They’re somehow both futuristic and nostalgic, capturing everything but the present moment.”
Working with Congleton was a whole new world in itself; to date, Kinsley has made music almost entirely on her own, producing and mastering new techniques out of her bedroom. “My musical life has been such a specific, insular thing,” she notes. “At the beginning of this process, I didn’t even have the language to communicate with John as a collaborator. I’d stand in the studio saying things to him like: ‘This song needs to feel more yellow.’ Working through that was really incredible.” With Congleton’s fingerprints on many of Kinsley’s favourite albums, from Angel Olsen’s ‘All Mirrors’ to ‘Masseduction’ by St. Vincent, “it was weird to be in the same room as a person whose work defined so many of my life experiences. Even just having lunch with him at the start felt like a lot.”
“I’m thinking more about who I want to be in each moment rather than fighting what’s meant to happen”
As the sessions continued, though, it became clear they were “a perfect pairing”. “I don’t know if it comes from being a classical musician, but I have this intent for technicality, a need for every detail to be perfect. John sort of took all that and let it breathe out into something way more organic and real.” As a debut album arriving a few years into her music career, ‘Escaper’ sounds the closest out of its predecessors to the ‘Kinsleyan’ musical ideal, flush with symphonic grandeur, luscious string arrangements and sensuous, celestial energy.
“Paying homage to classical elements in my work feels necessary to me,” says Kinsley, who remains fond of her time in orchestras and ensembles and still loves the likes of Chopin and Ravel. “It makes me remember who I was when I started: someone who was just really curious and eager to learn everything.”
Much as it’s a visceral reaction to loss, ‘Escaper’ is equal parts a profound celebration of friendship – one of the deepest forms of love that Kinsley knows and the backbone to the grief that animates the album. The stirring, piano-led ‘Starling’ suspends us in one of the “sweetest moments” in her life: a dinner in London last year with two of her closest friends from university. All three were passing through London by chance – Kinsley closing out her European tour at Lafayette that night – and convened at a hard-to-book restaurant where her friend knew someone in the kitchen.
“We all share a very specific connection with our friend who passed away,” Kinsley says. “So it was strange and beautiful to be together again. We talked a lot about our friend, about knowing each other, and how long we thought we might know each other. You know when you watch your friend talk about something they love and see this light spark up in their eyes? In that moment you just feel such immense love for them. We kept saying to each other: ‘We’re so lucky to be alive and to know each other.’”
And so the song goes: “We’re the lucky ones… To meet another is a miracle”, a line partly inspired by a Chinese quote in a journal once gifted by Kinsley’s aunt. “That connection of friendship makes you feel like you could live anywhere, do anything, so long as you know each other.”
Losing her other friend last year, this time out of choice, inspired ‘Last Time We Never Meet Again’, a friendship break-up song tinged with lightness and release: “I hope you get everything you wanted… But for myself, I hope I hear your name and I feel absolutely nothing”. Loss, while painful, shows up here in a different shape – one entailing the possibility of hope. “Some ends are necessary in order for us to begin again,” she learned.
What next, after fleeing reality into imagined worlds? Can you stay there forever? “When does it end? Does it ever go back to the old ways?” Kinsley calls out on ‘Escaper’, the album’s namesake closing track. She thinks back on a surprisingly resonant lesson in production from her audio studies professor: “I’d always thought of production as being additive, that having 200 layers in a song is what made it great,” she shares. “But he taught us that the beauty of song-making really comes from carving out space in the music, making these little pockets where you can truly hear sound.”
“I’m really trying to give into the world and give into love”
She continues: “At the beginning of working through my grief and making ‘Escaper’, I think I believed in this fallacy that if you keep doing things, keep distracting yourself, keep layering all this stuff onto your life, time will eventually pass and the thing you’re running from will not exist anymore. But the hard truth is you have to make space for that love to go into. Trying to forget or be a different person without carving out that space is kind of impossible. Escape becomes this weird loop that brings you back, this spiral of trying to get somewhere that doesn’t really exist.”
She decided to stop running. “I watched the death of a friendship and also the real death of someone I love. That makes you feel like you don’t really have anything to lose. I’m really trying to give into the world and give into love. To me, that feels like a very wide form of happiness.”
Indeed, there’s an urgency to this music, a delight in the extreme. On ‘Knights’, her self-described “angriest song” to date, Kinsley relishes in torching “the specific caricature of men who so badly wants to tell you they’re feminists”; that freedom also gives way to love, with Kinsley offering up “the sweetest, truest love song [she’s] ever written” with ‘My Name Is Dancing’.
To Kinsley, by the end of its tracklist, ‘Escaper’ sounds ”like waking up somewhere new.” She’s sung of other worlds, flung herself into rooms and spaces in other realms, but for now, she’s right here – sitting at her living room table, 24 years old for just over 24 hours now. There’s a whole universe inside of her, and fathoms more just waiting to reveal themselves.
Sarah Kinsley’s ‘Escaper’ is out September 6 via Verve Forecast/Decca
Listen to Sarah Kinsley’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music
Words: Cordelia Lam
Photography: Bella Howard
Styling: Caterina Ospina
Styling Assistance: Marta Garcia
Hair and Makeup: Stèfan Jemeel
Location: Tileyard TYX