When Kilo Kish began writing her new song “Negotiate,” she had been feeling the constant pressure so many artists face to continually produce and move at breakneck speeds in a digital era, where it seems like music and new releases charge ahead in double-time.
“The speed of technology moves so, so quickly, so you’re always in this race, trying to keep up with it,” Kilo explains in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “So ‘Negotiate’ is a song that’s steeped in that: in my own personal wonderings about, ‘Okay, well, where is music going? Where am I going? How can we keep up with this pace?’”
As she began writing, she started playing around with different vocals and began to think about what else might work on the song. She and Miguel had teamed up for the song “Death Fantasy” back in 2022, and she thought his distinctive sound would work to drive home the message of this one. “Miguel‘s voice is so iconic,” Kilo says. ” You understand it. You know that it’s him. I think he did such an amazing job of bringing life to ‘Death Fantasy,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, maybe we should. This is a kind of similar setup again. Maybe he would want to do it again.’”
The final result is an electronic spiderweb of a song, driven by Kilo’s layered vocals. Partway through, Miguel’s voice starts to pipe in, adding texture and a haunting touch to the production. The song comes with a music video that shows Kilo in a drab, almost dystopian office cubicle, practically invisible as people run by her to either dump more paperwork on her or take what they need. She says the idea for the visuals came to her first, and she’d been thinking a lot about gray, cold office spaces, “devoid of personality and devoid of creativity.”
All of it fits into the larger aesthetic and ideas behind Negotiations, Kilo’s upcoming project out on May 16. It’s her follow-up to 2022’s American Gurl, which, in addition to Miguel, featured Jean Dawson, Vince Staples, and Jesse Boykins III. On the EP, Kilo says she had been examining her own career as a rapper/singer-songwriter and visual artist, and the expectations that come with creating and guiding your own artist work.
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“I think I always used to be a person that was like, ‘Oh, I can write an EP and an album and do an art presentation and write a short book and also lead a short film, all in the same four months, and do all the creative for it. And I think I just learned over time, yeah, that does a number on you, it does a number on your body, it does a number on your cells. You need breaks in between to be able to operate at your best.”
She walked away from making Negotiations with more insight about how she wants to manage her own creative processes and work moving forward. “For me, it’s all about taking care of yourself and taking care of those around you, taking care of our world. There’s no way we can’t just stay on a treadmill forever and expect not to get tired, you know?”
