Album Review: K.Flay - 'MONO'
K. Flay's fifth album is her darkest yet, as she comes to terms with an incident no musician wants to go through - permanent hearing loss.
Back in 2022, the Illinois-born musician of Kristine Flaherty, under the alias of K.Flay, was riding the waves of potent release Inside Voices / Outside Voices and enjoying everything that came with the stamp of a musician: Writing deeply intoxicating music and performing it to fanatics across the world. All of that was thrown in the air upon a bucket-list expedition to Mount Kilimanjaro and the High Enough superstar had a new charted path to take.
Within a week of returning home to Los Angeles, the two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter woke up one morning with total hearing loss in her right ear—a freak occurrence her doctors deemed permanent, leading her to question whether she’d ever make music again. But soon after returning to the studio, it turned out that same purpose had been renewed in a new sense. The new sense of literally hearing her music in a new way.
Now, MONO marks the start of a new era for K.Flay. With new eras, come a blistering new emporium of warped electronics and infectious melodies wrapped around the new status quo of K.Flay new version of life, and ultimately having to accept the change it brings.
At the heart of it all, MONO is a no-holds-barred futuristic rock record that is so sonically dense with K.Flay splurging out her deepest and darkest work to date. The opener in itself is an outpour; an exasperation straight after Kristine's hearing loss, and demonstrates a perfect showcase for her sharp-witted lyrics and shapeshifting vocal work. Raw Raw is an abrasive stand-alone hyperbole to the true nature of vulnerability. Punisher is equally frenetic, as Flay's forces a remiss on her tendencies, "Nobody knows how to punish me like me..." while Irish Goodbye - the lead single - is undeniably Flay at her heaviest and her most raw as she self-implodes in a flurry of losing face with Pierce the Veil’s Vic Fuentes. A professional screamer who undoubtedly put his two cents into this single, after his own work of The Jaws of Life was equally received well earlier this year.
The album is not all attack, mind. It also plays host to many a-brooding moments including Bar Soap and Shy, which are deeply introspective with their lyrical lacings, just as much as they are echoic in sound. There are also sultry piano-led ballads with Hustler and final notes of condition, Perfectly Alone - a resounding figure head of just accepting anonymity.
In America, meanwhile, offers a lashing lyrically to the commentary of gun welfare in the Land of Opportunity, blitzed with searing guitar loops and powerhouse drums. Chaos Is Love is a more stylised throwback to Flay's reserved offerings in 2019's Solutions while glitchy Yes I'm Serious plays into a blatant response to the quipped intro at the start of the album - almost as if the very notion of making music after her potentially devastating setback was impossible. Yet, despite what is conjured up here, it wasn't.
A dark stirring pot of hard-hitting lyrics, scathing synths, howling guitar inflections and compressed air-can drums, brings K.Flay into a new sphere with her music - a drastic change-up has brought about an artist at her most real; a lust for making music that was more personalised than anything before. "In the aftermath of the hearing loss, it felt like it would’ve been okay for me to stop trying,” she says. “But I wanted to try, which meant a lot more sweat and tears and a lot more humility. It reminded me that it’s exciting to care about your work, to care about the people you’re sharing it with, to care about the world. There’s really so much beauty in that caring.” Flay's a-ha moment may have been at the expendable result of an upset to her love of listening to music, but it's more about the sheer willingness to shift her whole paradigm and see it through to the end. This remarkable feat is tinged throughout this record, laced with raw songwriting and powerful expressions.
Words by Alex Curle
