Friday, 29 January 2021

NEW #8 - Kynsy

 


“Rowdy pop for all the family.” That’s how Dublin based newcomer Kynsy (real name Ciara Lindsey) describes her music. But take a listen to her debut EP Things That Don’t Exist (released yesterday) and initially you could easily think that this 23 year old doesn’t know what rowdy means. For it all starts with some disjointed synths and a throb of pulsing bass reminiscent of OMD's Joan of Arc (Maid of Orleans) that sounds more calming than disorderly, but give it a few more seconds and things really get going. For this is a collection of really good kooky songs that boom with life.

From the Strokes referencing Happiness Isn’t A Fixed State where Kynsy sings of how she has so much left to feel, to the wonky pop of Dog Videos (which you’ll find on the latest update of the Breaking More Waves New Music Weekly playlist - click here), Things That Don’t Exist is all about earworms and melody. Yet residing within her good tunes there’s a bunch of idiosyncratic ideas and oddball experimentation that make them stand out. The songs were all written and co-produced by Kynsy herself and mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer (Interpol / Parquet Courts) and Barny Barnicott (Arctic Monkeys / MIA / Bombay Bicycle Club).

The blurb that accompanies the release of the EP finds Kynsy saying of it: "A lot of the songs are based around the idea of how we as people are either being followed or chasing after things that don’t exist. We are followed by the things we see through technology, television, the news - things that derail and confuse our sense of reality.  We also chase things that don’t exist.  We ignore the fact that things could change in a blink, or chase idealistic dreams of the future based on things we've seen on TV or on phone screens."

I’ve seen the EP described elsewhere as genre-hopping, but taken as a whole it doesn’t feel that way to me. There’s variation in the instrumentation used, but it’s a complete package. It’s just the sound of Kynsy.

Rowdy pop for all the family nails it then.

Kynsey - Dog Videos

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