Katy Kirby: The Best of What’s Next
By Matt Mitchell for Paste –
For years, Paste 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. When she put out her debut album, Cool Dry Place, in 2021 through Keeled Scales, a label based in Austin—a 45-minute drive southeast from her hometown of Spicewood, where she grew up in an evangelical household and was homeschooled and taught to embrace the covenants of her faith—Kirby happened to be in the midst of a year-long stint in the city.
Before then she took to Nashville, enrolling at Belmont College (which she lovingly calls “Vanderbilt for dumb kids who want to play music” or “Berklee for kids who are not that good at music theory”) to study songwriting but quitting and immediately becoming an English major—only to spend a decade in the city, despite never really falling in love with the idea of becoming a native. “I was planning on moving out of there within a year for the entire time I was there,” Kirby explains. Fast-forward to a few years ago, and the 28-year-old has settled into a life in Brooklyn, her home-base for the release of her sophomore record, Blue Raspberry.
I’ve been drawn to Kirby’s work ever since I first heard Cool Dry Place, a debut record that made enough waves to land her on ANTI-’s roster and vault her from being an opening act on—according to my dear friend from NYC—every bill in town to headlining her own US tour with fellow Paste favorite Allegra Kreiger this spring. I suppose I hold a biased solidarity with any and all fellow English/writing majors who have elected to roam this world blissfully unqualified to do anything else. Within minutes of jumping on Zoom with Kirby, we start talking about Victorian novelist (and certified drag) Thomas Hardy, and that is the hallmark of a kismet if I’ve ever stumbled into one. “My girlfriend started reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles out loud to me recently and I was like, ‘Damn, is this guy okay?’” she explains.
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Photo by Tonje Thilesen
