King Princess has nothing to prove, but a whole lot to say on ‘Girl Violence’

M

ikaela Straus is back in New York. After a few years living in the sprawling, sun-soaked streets of Los Angeles, it’s in the cacophonous mess of the Big Apple that she feels most herself. Calling in from her childhood home, equipped with a comfy hoodie and a boatload of snacks, she’s never seemed more liberated.

“It’s so nice to be home,” she smiles. “There’s something about the movement of New York, the symphonic chaos of just walking around. I went to high school in this city, I got my heart broken for the first time here; I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

Within this comfortingly uncomfortable landscape, she forged her towering third album, ‘Girl Violence’, drawing every drop of her hometown’s frenzied, frenetic energy and embedding it throughout the fabric of the thirteen-song thriller. An album she’s been writing from the age of fourteen – when she “proudly became a member of the girl violence community” – it represents a musician entirely in control of their art and no longer afraid to tell the tough stories.

“For the first time, I refused to allow any anxiety to influence my writing,” she explains. “I didn’t have a label when I made this record, so I had no outside perspective apart from my friends and the people in the studio – it was basically just the people who came in to smoke some weed and listen to music. In the past, I’ve struggled with writer’s block and performance anxiety, but that only happened when I would focus too much on perception. Now, I’m not interested in what other people think.”

There is a small caveat to that thought, though. “Actually, the only people I care about are the front three rows of the crowd at my shows. I’m really lucky as a queer artist to have a fanbase that is full of love but also really honest. They tell me all I need to know; they’re a great barometer of what’s working. So long as I keep them in mind, I know exactly what to do; it’s a really freeing perspective.”

To bring this new chapter to life, Mikaela turned to an army that included Unknown Mortal Orchestra multi-instrumentalist Jake Portrait and IDLES frontman Joe Talbot, who lends his vocals to the swirling, sultry, RAYE-esque track ‘Say What You Will’. Together, they formed the foundation upon which ‘Girl Violence’ was built, giving her the space to express herself in the most honest and plain terms.

“Jake and Joe held so much trust in me and my words that it just made it so easy. Once we agreed on the sonic palette and had a clear vision, I basically wrote the lyrics sitting on the couch, stoned, allowing whatever came to me to come out without any second-guessing. I was in the studio I grew up in, surrounded by the right people – it was the perfect storm, and it’s why I love this record so much.

“I’m so lucky to have a creative community around me here in New York and, y’know, we have great taste, so I removed the fodder, blocked out the noise, and made the album I wanted to make in exactly the way I wanted to make it – I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

It’s within this warm, unshackled environment that ‘Girl Violence’ fully filled its potential. A term that Mikaela has been writing about since she was 18, pre-viral hit ‘1950’, the album swirls through dizzying tales of sapphic romance, from euphoric highs to crushing lows. Through it all, though, there is one central question tying the album together, posed in the ominous, wry smile-laden opener and title-track: “Why does no one mention girls can be violent?”

“That lyric is the mission statement for the whole project,” Mikaela states. “I’m posing a question to both the crowd and myself, like, what is this chaos that we’re causing as lesbians?

“Each song is designed to slowly answer that question, which is why the next line is ‘I hate it but I kinda like it’. Basically, this shit is incredibly painful, brutal, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The answer is teased out through a track list that lulls you into a false sense of security before pulling the rug from under your feet and sending you spiralling back to your lowest ebb. ‘Jamie’, a fuzzy, raspy story of unrequited love, bleeds into the rediscovery of self-confidence in ‘Origin Story’, before drum-driven ‘I Feel Pretty’ and alt-pop middle finger ‘Cry Cry Cry’. Just when you think Mikaela’s at the height of her powers in the tongue-in-cheek beckoning of ‘Get Your Heart Broken’, blues-rock ‘Girls’, and sizzling, sweaty lead single ‘RIP KP’, the steps she’s climbed crumble beneath her, throwing her to the wolves in ‘Alone Again’ and seeing her pack up and leave in ‘Slow Down Shut Up’.

“I love peaks and valleys in a body of music; it makes it more realistic. Life’s not a linear journey. You fall down the mountain just when you think you’re about to hit the top, it’s an evil miracle!”

“There’s always a slutty song on my sad albums.”

The topsy-turvy nature of the record, reinforced by experiments with tempo and modulation, takes us back to the start of this album cycle. Mikaela is back in LA, trying to make music whilst feeling detached from everything that forged her identity, and it’s not clicking. That’s not to say that her fierce songwriting talent didn’t break its way to the surface every now and again, but it wasn’t until she reconnected with her past lives that she really found her stride and fundamentally understood what ‘Girl Violence’ was and could become.

“Making music in LA is a more transient experience,” she reflects. “I was bouncing around from studio to studio, just floating through but not really attaching to anything. That’s fine if you want to make singles, but – in the words of Nicki Minaj – I’m an album artist. I started some of the songs in LA, in fact, ‘Girl Violence’, the song, was started there, but it wasn’t until I got back to New York that I reviewed it and realised that I’d written some more with Jake and Joe that were synonymous with that concept.”

“I needed this album to be made in the same way as the rock and grunge albums that are my North Stars when it comes to songwriting; those albums were all made in self-produced ecosystems, they were based around a routine which is imperative for me to be productive. Y’know, the walk to the studio that you do every single day influences the record, the bar you go to after, where you talk about music and your ideas for the record, influences it. I couldn’t have made this album anywhere but here.”

So ‘Girl Violence’, really, is a new album in name alone. Inspired by late-90s and early-00s alt-rock, namely Fiona Apple and Radiohead, it’s a record that becomes the latest in a line of symbiotic albums, explicitly drawing threads to 2019’s ‘Cheap Queen’ and 2022’s ‘Hold On Baby’. More than that, though, the making of the record took Mikaela back to the very beginning of her musical journey, transporting herself back to the early teenage years, where she first explored storytelling through music.

“All of these songs were made to be played on a guitar or a piano because I still approach life the way that I did at fourteen. Back then, I’d come home from high school full of hormones, sit down at the piano and try to figure it all out. I’ve always been better at writing down any big feelings I’m having instead of talking about them or dealing with them in a traditional way.

“Also, one of the first things that Jake said to me when we were deciding to go into this together was that he was really interested in the way that I’ve used backing vocals in my work. It sounds like a minor thing, but it was a real vote of confidence for the way I make music, and it allowed me to reference myself and really dial into the parts of my music that really feel like a part of my identity.”

One thread that Mikaela appears especially proud of, revealed with a smirk and a twinkle in her eye, is that “there’s always a slutty song on my sad albums”. The latest in that specific family, started by 2019’s ‘Pussy Is God’, is the lead single ‘RIP KP’. Released in June, it beckoned in this new chapter with a sensual swagger, stepping through a steamy, sweaty haze to announce that King Princess was BACK, baby.

“I feel like it’s indicative of the start of ‘Girl Violence’, it’s kinda ground zero for the whole concept. It’s just me being like ‘I’m deceased’, it’s death by the pussy. Sonically, it’s so fun too – we really tuned up the snare and played a lot of the guitar on a beautiful old Magnetone. But, really, it’s just a way of easing people into the romantic chaos while they move their hips around.”

On an album so soaked in intense emotion and heart-tearing confusion, it would be all too easy to get dragged down into the pits of despair – and, in the past, maybe that’s somewhere Mikaela would have found herself, embroiled in an anxiety-riddled spiral of expectation. But that was before she discovered the joy of her live show, which is the place that King Princess really comes to life.

“I think for artists like me who grew up in the studio, it’s impossible to comprehend just how massive an impact playing live can have on your music. It’s just invaluable information. Now, I’m writing music, thinking ‘How will this go on stage?’ or ‘What’s going to feel good to throw my body around to?’ I know exactly how I want to feel on stage, so I’m making sure every song can take me to that place.

“It takes the meaning of my songs to a different place, too. Like, I’ll be up there dancing around and suddenly think of something that a particular song doesn’t even relate to. It sounds kinda woo-woo, but it’s like shows mutate the meaning of my songs that I never thought about when I was writing. That energy does something to you, man, it’s a whole new journey of self-discovery.”

Embracing the power of performance has also thrown open another valuable door for Mikaela: the chance to act. She’d been toying with it around the time of ‘Hold On Baby’, but it’s since then that she’s grabbed the opportunity with both hands. Far from being a distraction or separation away from music, it emboldened her to search even deeper in her psyche for inspiration and, subsequently, realisation.

“I think of myself as a Swiss Army Knife-type of artist,” she chuckles, “and I’m just adding new things to that jumble of tools.”

“[Acting] turns the mirror on you like nobody’s fucking business, but I’m not afraid of that. It’s really influenced my ability to not take myself too seriously, to try new ideas and allow myself to be silly without being too critical when something doesn’t work. I don’t hide behind production anymore; I let myself be ugly, to show emotion. I’ve always had a healthy self-deprecation to my music, but I’ve definitely leaned more into that cheekiness because of acting.”

“Also, acting and music are so interconnected,” she adds. “Acting is basically a character study, a lot of writing about the person you’re going to play, looking in the mirror and getting into that character – and that’s exactly what songs are! I’ve broken myself open more through acting than I have through music; hopefully, I get to keep doing it because I love it so much.”

As much as Mikaela is looking to the future, to the release of ‘Girl Violence’ and subsequent opportunities to get on stage and screen, she can’t help but be drawn to the past versions of King Princess. Where some artists grow out of albums and try to shed debut EPs like a snake sheds its skin, Mikaela holds every song she’s written, every word she’s sung and stage she’s played on in the highest possible esteem.

“Those albums are like epitaphs to what I was feeling when I was 19 or 22; it’s a memorial to whatever I was dealing with at that time. There’s no fucking way that I could have written this album without going through that shit. ‘Girl Violence’ is a culmination of those albums – like, I’ve been writing about girl violence as a concept since before I was a musician – I needed to go through all that to get to this exact point right now, and I wouldn’t change where I am for the world.”

This consistent growth is most powerfully summed up in one line delivered to Mikaela by her closest friends: “When they heard the record for the first time, they turned to me and said, ‘Mikaela, you sound free’.”

“I have to remind myself that my life is amazing, I’m so grateful for everything I have. It’s such a privilege to do what I do, especially with my community and my friends – I love those dumb bitches so much! If I compare where I am now to where I was before the last record, I’d say that ‘Hold On Baby’ is desolate, but ‘Girl Violence’ is empowered.”

“This album is a big fuck you to all those fucking people trying to take us down”

This empowerment defines not only this new King Princess chapter but also allowed Mikaela to cope more saliently with a global society shifting ever further from the progressive, inclusive future that seemed so achievable even ten years ago. Her native America is facing the very real possibility of a ban on gay marriage, Burkina Faso became the latest nation to criminalise homosexuality altogether, and the UK is run by a government refusing trans+ healthcare that has saved lives for decades. In an era defined by social regression, Mikaela refuses to be dragged under by a world which, frankly, would be nothing without queer people.

“Of course it’s extremely affecting, every young person I know is dealing with a base level of anxiety that just gets worse with each new announcement or law change, so yeah, it’s scary to release an album that’s gay as hell right now, but I think it’s a sign of how strong we are as queer people.”

“We’re the arbiters of taste; you wouldn’t have art or fashion without gay people – literally anything artistic? That’s us bitch. Behind any pop star is an army of homos holding them up; nobody would be anybody without gay kids. Like, look at fan culture right now – all the pop music that’s coming out, all the films, anything – it’s all the gay stuff that’s popular, that’s what’s being funnelled into popular culture. In fact, we’re so powerful that straight people are trying to take us down because they’re so scared of the power of difference – it means that their historic reign of power is less important than they thought it was.

“The more that we make art to tell our stories, the less that we can be ignored. When the going gets tough for queer people, we get together, we laugh, we make art, and we stand taller than ever – that’s what we do. So this album is a big fuck you to all those fucking people trying to take us down, but it’s also a testament to how powerful we are.”

In much the same way that Mikaela feeds off the social malaise that tries to render her helpless, ‘Girl Violence’ is only made more effective because of where we are as a society. An album unafraid to tell queer stories in all their messy glory, it acts as a touchstone for any queer person feeling as though they are somehow different, somehow forbidden from living the same fulfilling, expressive lives as their straight counterparts. It’s an album full to the brim with catharsis, both for Mikaela and her crowd, and you’ll never kill the beauty in that.

Talking to Mikaela just over a week before release day, how is she feeling now? “I always feel a bit funky just before an album comes out because you’re sort of celebrating but also working, you’re just sitting around waiting for people to hear it and tell you what they think. On the whole, though, I’ve had a lot of fun, and I want to feel as much celebration as possible. This album is a homecoming for me in so many ways, so it’s been nice to have some ceremony back in my life.”

Looking into the future, one where ‘Girl Violence’ has got the flowers it deserves and Mikaela is basking in the glow of another stunning fan favourite, she just has one simple thing that she wants from the process.

“Simply, I would like to have fun,” she smiles. “I want everyone who is linked to this record – listeners, producers, writers – to feel seen, but honestly, yeah: I just want to have fun.”

‘Girl Violence’ is the best King Princess record to date. Back at home, back in a loving, faithful community, and unafraid of placing her heart firmly on her sleeve, Mikaela has never been more in control of her immense power. Good job she’s got some queer panic to keep her grounded, then, eh? ■ 

Taken from the October 2025 issue of Dork. King Princess’ album ‘Girl Violence’ is out now.