james K

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james K is a New York-born vocalist, producer, and multidisciplinary artist whose ethereal, genre-defying sound has quietly shaped the trajectory of underground music for over a decade. james K has been a cosmic point of the aesthetic underground across the world. Her breathy, lilting vocals have floated across some of the past year’s best music. Expanding and ethereal, they make you feel like the call is coming from inside the house. 

With her third, acclaimed album Friend, she returns to her creative core weaving melody, emotion, and technical mastery into a hypnotic body of work that feels at once intimate and expansive. Through her voice and vision, james K continues to redefine what experimental pop can feel like. Both james K’s polysemantic lyrics and lush production provide the listener an opportunity to experience for oneself the song as a journey and to arrive at their own conclusions: liberated from the urgency of knowing, but ushered by the need to find out. K paints a narrative with an ever-broadening host of references, nestling us inside of Friend’s familiarity: timeless and indefinable. Pitchfork has called her sound “as dazzling as a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and as wily and soft too,” a line that sits alongside acclaim from The Guardian, The New York Times, The FADER, Alt Press and Resident Advisor; K was also named a BBC Radio 6 Music Breaking Artist and included in the Dazed 100.

K has consistently beta-launched sounds and perspectives that have rippled across many mediums for years, defining a way that is both singular in vision and marked by collaboration and shared dreaming. To this day, her transmutative career has led K to amass a bouquet of collaborations with artists like Oli XL, Priori, and Drew McDowall (Coil). K has been a resident on NTS, with her show, ‘Trip Lick,’ since 2019, and she has provided mixes for series such as Dekmantel and Crack. She has completed residencies with Issue Project Room and TIMES and was recently commissioned to reimagine Popol Vuh’s original score for Werner Herzog’s ‘The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner’ (1974).

Based in New York where she was born and has lived most of her life, there is a constant evolution of the city which she embodies sonically, like the growth, decay and push, pull of relationships and spaces. At the crux of these crossroads is the homespun and ever-evolving DIY rave culture which continues to embody and cycle through lives of its own. This ecology spans across geographical lines and remains the touchstone and core of the james K vocation: the backbone and infrastructure from which her distinctive command of interwoven guitar and electronic arrangements ultimately coalesces. Grafting fragments of the real and the surreal is the provenance she draws from in her thoughtful and emotive international performances including Way Out West, End of the Road, Dekmantel, Rally, iii Points, and a sold-out headline at London’s Barbican and New York City’s Webster Hall. 

“Known for her polychromatic hypersensitivity, K’s hauntological dream pop is making ‘music that slows the anxious heart while holding a mirror to the deep-rooted angst we prefer to leave unspoken.’ – Resident Advisor

“As dazzling as a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and as wily and soft too” – Pitchfork

“james K is a prodigious talent” – DAZED

“As dazzling as a rabbit pulled out of a hat, and as wily and soft too” – Pitchfork

“James K is a prodigious talent” – DAZED