Music
KUČKA: “Women don't need a man behind them to make good music”
In the lead up to the release of her debut album, Wrestling, we spoke to electronic polymath Laura Jane Lowther about carving out her own sound.
A few years ago, KUČKA changed everything. She ended a long term relationship. She moved from Perth to Los Angeles. She married a woman and came out as queer to her family. And away from expectation and everyone who knew her, she entered into a new chapter of her life. “It was like opening one door gave way to a million other doors,” the artist born Laura Jane Lowther says.
This monumental life change is documented on Wrestling, her debut album, out April 30 on Soothsayer. The album captures the ecstasy and agony of reinvention, from the turbulence of leaving everyone behind to the excitement of meeting someone new.
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Her metamorphosis had been a long time coming. “I moved to Australia when I was 16. For a lot of that time, I was a little bit lost. Even though I wasn’t thoroughly unhappy, I never really found my feet in Australia,” she tells Red Bull Australia down the phone from her new home in California. “When I moved to LA, it was at the end of the most depressed state I’d ever been in like, what the hell am I doing with my life? I need a change.”
Packing up and heading to a new city granted her a sense of freedom that felt revelatory. “I was like, okay I don’t know anyone here. No one’s keeping tabs on me. I’m not in a relationship. What do I really want to do? How do I want to spend my days? So I felt like I kind of grew into myself when I moved here.”
KUČKA
© Dillon Howl
As well as documenting a period of personal reinvention, Wrestling is also momentous for her as an artist -- it’s a debut album that has been many years in the works.
Her career as KUČKA began in 2014, when she shared the track ‘Divinity’ and immediately marked herself as an artist to watch. In the years that followed, Lowther released her solo EP Unconditional, toured with the likes of Mount Kimbie, sang live at Coachella and was selected as part of the prestigious Red Bull Music Academy class of 2016 in Montreal.
She was also an in-demand vocalist to other electronic artists, who wanted her distinctive, ethereal vocals on tracks. Lowther doesn’t regret the time spent working with other artists, but making Wrestling was a way to show the world her own sound. It also allowed her to flex her talents --- all of them.
Lowther wrote, produced and recorded all of Wrestling herself, as well as singing on many of the tracks. That decision was partly a matter of convenience -- doing everything herself allowed Lowther to work to her own schedule, and execute things to her own “specific vision” -- but there were also reasons of principle.
“I’m a process artist. Writing stuff helps me with thoughts. But I would go into LA sessions where it felt like a churn and burn environment where people were like -- oh do you like this beat? How about this? Oh, do you want to work with a topliner? All of that stuff felt so ridiculous to me to me and very impersonal,” Lowther explains. “I found that when you’re working with other people they don’t listen to you. It’s good to be able to make stuff yourself and be able to cut out the bullshit you have to deal with in the studio, especially with men.”
There was a lot of that bullshit.
“You send people tracks and they’ll be like ‘sounds cool, who produced it?’ And you’re like… me. [They’re] just so shocked. I don’t really care that they’re shocked, but it shows that people just don’t believe that women can do it. And that pisses me off.”
I’m not asking you to call me a genius, but inevitably if a man works on your record they will get the credit.
“People say that it’s changing but I think it’s very slow. So I do want people to know that I did it [all], mostly just to change this idea that women always need to have a man behind them to make good music. I’ve even played tracks that are collaborations to people who are meant to be part of my team and they’ve been like ‘oh my god, that person you work with is such a genius’. Basically giving this collaborator all the credit for the track. And it’s like, I’m not asking you to call me a genius, but inevitably if a man works on your record they will get the credit.”
The personal subject matter of the album also meant she wanted to limit the number of outside influences on it. Over the years spent making the album, Lowther had many studio sessions with other artists. But in the end, only three collaborative tracks made it onto Wrestling.
One of them was with a longtime collaborator: Harley Streten, AKA Flume. Laura had previously contributed vocals to Flume’s 2016 album Skin and 2019’s Hi This Is Flume mixtape but for Wrestling, the pair worked together as producers, with Laura taking a couple of their hungover studio sessions and morphing them into the track ‘Drowning’.
Another collaborator was her wife, Dillon Howl, who served as Lowther’s creative director: shooting the album and single covers and directing five of the music videos as well as “about a million other things that helped bring the visual aspect of Wrestling to life”.
The changes in her personal life transformed Lowther’s music as well: “I stopped making stuff that I was ‘supposed to’ make and just made things that I wanted to make," she says. "I came back to myself.”
Wrestling takes her avant-electronica sound to new heights, blending organic elements like field recordings with soft synths, autotune and layered production for an icy, shiny palette she describes as “Hi-Fi DIY”. The final 12 tracks are introspective electronic pop unlike anything else coming out of Australia right now.
Lowther is excited to share the product of years of growth exploration with the world.
“I had such huge shifts in my life. That’s why I called it Wrestling -- because I thought it was a title that has so many different meanings,” she says. “There’s the obvious of the physical, like wrestling as a struggle. But there’s also wrestling in a performative sense, and then also sexual connotations. I guess because I wrote it over such a long time and there wasn’t just one theme. I felt like there’s songs about love, there’s songs about struggling through some stuff, there’s songs that are kind of fun.”
Just like life, Lowther says, “I wanted it to go through a broad spectrum of emotions.”
