Okay Kaya - Watch This Liquid Pour Itself review

The Guardian 60

(Jagjaguwar)
Kaya Wilkins’ second album ranges from confessional blood-letting to 50s ballads and disco-pop – in her own inimitable style

On this beguiling second album by New York singer Kaya Wilkins, it’s as if heartbreak has been translated into her native Norwegian and back again via some dodgy machine learning: there’s something wonderfully off about her tales of thwarted lust. An excruciating date is sketched out on Zero Interaction Ramen Bar as “my parasite and I are blushing: a cold one and a sentient dumpling”. At another point she disarmingly admits: “I know sex with me is mediocre / but I can give you asexual wellbeing.” Perhaps the sense of wonkiness is pharmacological in nature. “What if the pills I take will stop me getting wet?” she frets on one of the best tracks, opener Baby Little Tween, and Psych Ward has her dutifully necking more pills as chaos reigns: “Crisis management on the intercom in the psych ward,” she notes with dry detachment, a really funny moment.