Having declared her emotional turmoil defeated, alt-pop artist Nastiya Kai is set to move on to a brighter and “Never Better” creative phase this year with her latest EP ‘newnew.wav.’
Stream: ‘newnew.wav’ – Nastiya Kai
Given that she put out an album entitled Demon Era just last year, you might expect that Nastiya Kai has experienced a positive mood swing, now that she is back with a new single very conversely titled “Never Better.”
But the LA-based, by-way-of-Moscow artist and performer insists that not all listeners will walk away from this track feeling light-hearted and fluffy.
“I’m really over the fact that I don’t want people to love it,” she says of the song. “I just hope that it’s going to make someone feel better – or just feel. Bottom line. I just want to make people happy or sad or angry, but I want to make them feel, because I feel like we forget that. The world is too fast-paced. We forget to look within ourselves.”
Growing up, Nastiya Kai was exposed to multiple sources of music. Her father’s piano playing and singing was an early inspiration, and she later took it upon herself to learn the piano and guitar on her own. As she got older, she began investigating the specific instruments of to her native country, including the guitar-like Balalaika and the bronze orthodox church bells that are very particular to Russia. Ultimately, Kai became curious about what lay outside her nation’s borders musically, and as she started to travel and live abroad, she made an effort to uncover the musical scene just about everywhere she ventured. It was a process that she summarizes as “traveling, meeting people, making connections, having conversations, broadening your perspective, and then implementing that in your music.”
All of this artistic inspiration eventually led Kai to publish of her first original compositions online. She later took them down, however, not because she didn’t like them but because she decided they were not the greatest representations of herself as an artist. She continued her musical experimentation, hoping to get her sound to sufficiently match her vision. Teaming up with old friend and fellow Russian producer Ivan Petrov was ultimately what did the trick.
“Basically, I had my songs, l had my lyrics, I had my chords, and I had my bass,” she recounts. “I brought them to him and I said, ‘This is it, can you help me bring that to life?’ And so, we actually sat, in the basement together for six months, bouncing ideas back and forth and trying to bring them to life. And then, we had the album.”
That very album, Demon Era, is designed to sonically evoke the various challenges that Kai has had to confront throughout her life. Most of all, she has long had Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), and those struggles are encapsulated throughout her debut LP.
“Demon Era, to me, is a compilation of everything bad that’s ever happened to me,” she says. “Generally, my life has been quite turbulent because of my mental health issues and a lot of other things. And that sort of darkness was something I couldn’t let go of for the longest time… I just wanted to get all of that darkness out, so that’s what that record was to me. It was just my diary.”
Indeed, the music on Demon Era is meant to evoke the multiple chapters in Kai’s turbulent life story – the highs (“Party at My House”), the lows (“Death Wish”), and everything in between. “Every single song is a legitimate story from my life, and I just wanted to put it out there,” she explains. “I need a mirror to my life.”
Kai has fortunately become “healthier and happier” over the year that has passed since Demon Era‘s release.
Additional therapy sessions have helped, as did her decision to leave her current hometown of Los Angeles and go back home to Moscow last summer.
“I couldn’t handle it; my mental health was just not there,” Kai describes her state at the start of summer ’24. “I was by myself and was feeling lonely and sad.” Things improved dramatically once she returned to Moscow and reconnected with her native land, as well as her old friend and producer Ivan Petrov. During a casual catch-up session in Ivan’s backyard, the two of them brought out their laptops and recording equipment, and started tinkering with various sounds inspired by the infectious summertime joy they were experiencing then in early July.
“The energy of that first draft was so happy,” Kai recalls. “And then literally, when I got home, the first two words that I had on my mind were ‘Never Better.’ I thought, ‘Never better, never better….’ I just recorded it on my phone and put it in there.”
Kai kept the recording safely stored in her phone as she continued to enjoy her stay in Moscow for another fun-filled three months. Upon returning to Los Angeles, she returned to that loop and formally structured a composition out of it.
“That song just embodies what his summer meant to me,” she says. “It was the best summer of my life. So many great experiences happened to me, I had so much fun. I spent so much time in nature, we went on road trips, we spent days at lakes, I fell in love, I spent time with friends in my grandma’s village, it was so soothing for my soul. And that song is just all of that in a nutshell.”
Much of the rest of the accompanying EP, newnew.wav, released on April 25th, is produced in the same positive spirit as “Never Better.” As with Demon Era, the various songs on this record are meant to embody various life stories that Nastiya Kai has to tell. On the heels of such an enjoyable summer, one would expect many of those narratives to be more uplifting than those she had to share the last time around. One notable exception that she highlighted was “Sovru” (Russian for “What if?”), one of the few songs on newnew.wav to substantially feature sung lyrics.
“It’s very cryptic, but it’s about loving someone,” Kai says of the song. “It’s that horrible feeling when you know you have feelings for one another and they’re so deep, but you’ll never be able to say them out loud.”
Now that newnew.wav is officially out, Nastiya Kai has the liberty to broadly promote her new music, all while staying true to her side creative endeavors –
– most notably the Demon Era-inspired fashion line that she remains passionate about, despite having moved on from the inner turmoil that defined that creative period for her last year.
“The darkness inside of me is gone,” she insists. “But creatively, I get to play and do everything I want with that brand. There is still that darker side that I can tap into whenever I want to without having it impact me as a human or as an artist. That’s one thing that I love about fashion – it doesn’t necessarily need to reflect you as a human always. It can also be sort of a mask or playground. It’s like therapy, in a way.”
With Nastiya Kai’s spirit elevated and her creativity in full swing, it’ll be exciting to see what she continues to produce in the studio, the fashion department, or whatever area she sets her sights on in the coming future.
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