Katy Kirby talks about her recently-released sophomore album, 'Blue Raspberry,' in Paste's latest Best of What's Next profile.
has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers. This is the Best of What’s Next, a monthly profile column which highlights new acts with big potential—the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music.Katy Kirby is from everywhere and nowhere specific, and she’s intentionally vague about it.
“Growing up knowing God is always watching, even after you set that aside—and I’ve heard this from other people who are ex-evangelical or ex-Christian or ex-anything—the way you were raised and the things you were told not to do, or the ways you were told not be, whether you try to shed them or not, they do tend to follow you around a little bit,” Kirby says. “The sense that God is watching—or that someone is watching—is hard to shake.
“I’ve tried really hard, at certain points, to not let those parts come out to play, not anchor myself from certain reference points that feel tied to religion but, I don’t know, that was before I even knew that I had a brain separate from other people’s brains, before I was even necessarily aware of my own selfhood,” she continues. “That was the imagery and language and frameworks that I was dealing with, so I really did try, for a decade, to set it aside.