Klein is caught in a lie. On a weekday afternoon in New York, she asks me to meet her at a gallery on Canal Street for our interview, but she brought along her uncle—an incredibly tall Nigerian man in a suit with a firm handshake—who, like most of her family, has no clue she’s been making some of the most unpredictable and deeply personal electronic music out for nearly a decade. Klein, in town from South London, explains what’s going on to him as something like a school project for her university, one that she doesn’t actually go to. “It’s really kinda funny,” she says, ripping a cigarette, laughing like a Bond villain. “They don’t say anything but they must realize I’ve been in university longer than anyone ever.” This is the kind of shit that usually goes down in one of Preston Sturges’ screwball comedies.
On the real, though, I’m not shocked at Klein’s ability to take a ruse that far, considering her music is full of little jokes that probably only she fully gets and a real fuck it energy. Click around her Bandcamp page enough, and—as the instrumentals go from still and deadly quiet to a wall of thunderous noise; as the occasional vocal flourish alternates between sung, rapped, and barely audible spoken word—part of the fun is how off the cuff and bold it all feels, often ignoring the unspoken, Eurocentric rules of songmaking. It reminds me of watching Jason Williams highlight reels on YouTube, where he’s seemingly thinking more about what he can do with a basketball rather than putting it in the hoop.
Growing up, I’d go to these Haitian backyard parties in Brooklyn and Queens and for the entire night the same kompa rhythm would play with only slight shifts in tempo and vocals. I never thought that much of it, but now I realize how radically different it was from popular American music. My favorite music of Klein’s embraces these breaks from traditional song structures, while still having some sort of decipherable idea pushed to the edge.
I’m thinking of last year’s marked, which has a boiling rage in all of its gnarly, screeching guitar riffs. Or 2020’s Frozen, a hushed and motionless tape that evokes lost childhood memories. Or the comic touch of now that’s what i call r&b that upends the promise of the title with warped, ghostly melodies that would confound those nostalgic for Babyface-approved soul. Her new album, sleep with a cane, falls somewhere in the middle. While it occasionally feels overthought, it’s the tiny details that make me fuck with it: the dreamy harmonica solo on “score For J,” the chatter underneath the hellish ambience of “it is what it is in d minor,” the brooding keys of “(world star),” which is like a late 2010s UK drill beat in super slow-mo.
At the gallery, a showing of robot parts intertwined with mannequin limbs and guts all about the blurring of technology and humanity, Klein’s uncle trails a few feet behind us as we quickly take it in. After a few minutes, she abruptly suggests we go across the street to a coffee shop, where we grab a table in the back. We talked and nerded out for almost two hours. She has a bubbly and bit of a goofy personality that turns serious in the moments when I ask directly about her music, its intentions, and how it has been informed by hip-hop. At times, she’ll spontaneously pause to show me a UK rap record on YouTube she thinks I’ll dig (I had never heard Shxdow’s “My Story”—it was hard) or pull up her Tubi watchlist. Below is a lightly edited and condensed version of our sprawling conversation.
Klein: It’s like that newer Top Boy. When Drake took over, one of the main things I didn’t like was the lack of a score, but upon watching it again it kind of works. Because the music that does play just feels like the music people would actually play off their phone, so it makes it quite realistic. I’d like to see a film go fuck it and take away the score. I don’t need manipulative music to guide me.
I did my own film and it took me an hour before I added a score, it just felt too easy. Like, did you see The Whale?
They didn’t trust the audience to feel sorry for him, so they just kept playing this sad music while he’s eating and stuff.
The UK one innit? I love it. That’s why I love British TV: It’s so quiet, you’ll hear like this [Klein scratches at the collar of her black polo] and to me that is a score, too. I used to keep sounds of everything, like me sweeping and drinking water. That’s probably because I was a logger for TV for a hot minute. It was super fun.
I won’t name the show, but I was working on this one reality show on Channel 4 when I was younger. It was a crazy show about men being stupid. But each day I’d be given a roll of cameras and have to log what a specific character is doing. Like, let’s find all the bits of Jack laughing and put that into a folder. It’s because the show had such a fast turnaround time, so if you needed to find a character doing something, it would be right there. Once, there was a character getting a lot of flack, and I saw some other employees log when he falls asleep but not when the other guys do. It was a big eye opener how you can manipulate TV before it even gets to an editor.
I kind of used to live my life like a Sim so I didn’t get bored. It was just life. But I think that job definitely played a big part in how I was putting together my own stuff. I used to just have a folder for everything. You know, finding drums that are just like kitchen sounds or whatever.
It’s always so interesting to hear that industrial sound filter into rap. I feel like that shows how people are feeling. Like no, we don’t need that Timbaland drum. Let’s move on. Let’s wrap it up. Let’s move the genre forward. But even then everyone can sound like an algorithm of each other once everyone starts doing it.
No, but I feel like people are scared to do stuff without permission. Like, if you try something new and people don’t like it, it’s OK. It’s a recession man, we got to experiment [laughs]. I saw something you wrote about my album [marked] and it had me weak. You compared it to, like, a wrestling theme, or something like that, and I couldn’t tell if that meant you liked it or not, but I listened to it and was like, “Huh, makes sense.”
If I ever thought too much about that then I just wouldn’t make stuff. Like, you might not get why I wanted to have 10 minutes of silence, but I do, because it’s dedicated to Mark Duggan and I wanted to do that for him. Shit, I’m free. What the fuck? That’s why I have a song on the record called “young, black and Free.” I remember I started thinking that one day when I was watching The Color Purple, the new one—it’s quite bad. But halfway through, I started crying. We really lived in a world where they wouldn’t let us read. I called my friend and was like, “Yo, we running it up! Books are back bitches!” They were like, “Uh, what?” That’s why I made that song; we can really do anything we want. That’s like when people call my music “experimental,” I just think of it as being myself.
I made one record like that, it was called Harmattan. I wanted to make a record that an auntie could hear and actually chill to. But usually it’s just about capturing how I’m feeling. A lot of times people seem to gravitate to my more somber stuff, which I gather is because of a solitude thing. That’s why I think marked was cool, I made that like all in one session, standing, in a hyped mood and that’s the kind of record you can listen to with more than one person [laughs]. But, like, when you’re writing, I’m sure you don’t think too much about how people are going to feel about your opinion.
You know a writer who is like that?
Hilton Als.
He’s a nuts writer. I have a long way to go, but I have a secret art critic blog. But from what I’ve read of White Girls, it’s so—I’m gonna use that word— “experimental.” It blurs the lines between fact and fiction, and that’s something I try to be honest about in my work.
Yeah, I think my approach to music is inspired a lot by Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner and the videos that used to air on Channel AKA, an iconic British grime channel, where if you had an idea you piece it together and go fuckin’ ham. I feel like I work like the mixtape side of rap, like I’m gonna have a CD, sell it to 50 people, and then move onto the next thing.
It’s just really vulnerable. I remember when I was younger I cried to “Brand New Day,” because I was growing up in South London and it wasn’t easy—and having someone say that it was hard was everything. Then they released the instrumental album and it’s just like, here’s a flute, here’s a xylophone. That Fruity Loops drum kick. To me, it represented lost youth. I thought about that all while making my new album, like the harmonica on “score for J.” I think of that song like it could be in a Tyler Perry movie. Someone gets murdered and kidnapped, and then at the end we’re in church and it’s all fine [laughs].
It’s just so pure and honest. You can tell he was just figuring it out. It wasn’t so metronomic. Because sometimes, when you use Ableton’s metronome, it can take away from that. Like bro, I’m Nigerian. We Black. We don’t need them to know where to put a drum or a piano chord. We don’t have to tune a guitar that way just because they said that’s how you’re supposed to.
I loved Ghetts. I loved Tim and Barry. When I was younger we used to just be able to go into the Tim and Barry studios and there would just be people DJing, I thought I was in the future. It was a pretty crazy time. It was my introduction to music that was very fucked and manic, with loops and echoes, people writing the most insane bars. Obviously it was very male-centric. But there were artists like Lioness and Shystie that I’m surprised didn’t become super famous because they were fuckin’ sick. Shystie also had an interactive show where you basically get to decide what happened each episode. It was kind of a musical. You’d love it. Then came Nines, but I was more of a Giggs person.
I like Nines but sometimes with him I just want to read his words. But Giggs, I was looking back and that nigga with his emo jacket and chains was like a little hipster on his indie sleaze shit. Like when he did that video for “Talking Da Hardest,” I was like, Fair enough. No one could tell me what a video is supposed to be after that. There’s a level of play that makes it really personal.
I tend to hyperfixate on things, so I end up picking up random instruments to communicate without using my voice. I think it’s more vulnerable when I don’t use my voice. Like this new record is pretty emo and you can always feel my voice trying to come through and it really doesn’t all the way until the end.
In the neighborhood I used to live in, we’d just have police and police horses pacing around. My neighborhood was so active that the sirens—being used to suppress the people—would get picked up without me meaning for them to. I was crying about it and then I realized it was really cool and eerie. My reality was being filtered into the music. Like there’s so much “experimental” music that has gone through, like, three mix and mastering sessions before you hear it; it’s completely cleaned up.
There’s this one Kate Bush album called 50 Words for Snow. That’s one of my favorite albums by her, it makes me want to cry. You just see it immediately. After I heard that record, I couldn’t even listen to her other stuff that she’s more known for, because that one just felt so true to her. Very precious. MIKE has such a way with words, too. It’s so visceral, just like my Mobb Deep niggas. Prodigy was making scripts; when he raps, it’s like there’s 50 movies playing in my head.
There were times when they’d make suggestions to add a riff or whatever, but I was always like, “That’s not what I want to do.” I never gave a fuck about the music industry. I just always struggled with communicating and music was the best way to get it out. Writing songs takes me, like, years. If you ever see me doing an eight-song singing EP, just know that I’m either in a 360 deal or that the rent was due.
That’s why I made Now That’s What I Call R&B as kind of like a joke EP. I was listening to the pop girlies, and, like, y’all need to start using different types of riffs and runs, so I made that for fun. But when people heard that and turned up at my live show, they were very disappointed. Some complained to my agent, like “What the fuck is this?” They expected R&B and it was all drone and noise [laughs]. The exception is “Rich Dad Poor Dad” from the record, it’s really like an Elliott Smith type beat mixed with like the kind of singing you do in the semi-finals of The X-Factor. But usually when I do have vocals, I prefer if they’re a little deep in the cut.
I don’t know. I feel like if someone had a gun to my head I wouldn’t remember anybody’s lyrics.
There’s not many. I usually have to see it live for it to stick. One that I might be able to is “Because You Loved Me” by Celine Dion. Or the other day I was trying to remember the Girlfriends theme song and started singing it. I was mad hyped. I should add it as a bonus track to my Bandcamp.
That track is so gas! I actually have this track on my YouTube that’s taken from a live show where we took a Blade song and replaced his vocals with a modified trumpet that only made drone sounds and also a real trumpet. You’ll clock it as soon as you hear it, it’s called “Super Blade.” He’s such an amazing writer. Me and him should make a play together.
Bridges.
Uh, Bow Wow and Omarion’s Face Off mixtape. It’s so funny, there’s so many bridges on there. Remember the Bow Wow movie Lottery Ticket?
Yeah. I rewatched it the other day; I wish I could be in a movie like that. I miss when they used to air these small Black movies on MTV, like You Got Served and Coach Carter. Those whole films are bridges. It’s just that they always had to add these little devices to move the story along, like someone always has to get their life threatened or die. Why can’t the concept just be them winning the lottery or that they have to dance battle some white guys [laughs]?
That writer Simon Reynolds wrote about that once, that everything is a concept. That shit had me weak. I don’t know how I feel about that. The only time I think I really, really had a concept was when I made Tommy because it was all about a character named Tommie from Love & Hip Hop: Atlanta. Like this track was about Tommie when she went to have a chat, and this track is about Tommie when she got into a fight with Joseline. That’s a concept.
But I don’t usually think about my music like that. With everything else, like reality TV, I think about it. Why is there only one Black girl on Love Island? Why that product placement? Why does everything on Netflix look the same? Whereas with music, it’s just everything I felt in that moment. It’s the only thing where I can really go, And I just wanted to make that and that’s it.