INTERVIEW: King Princess on her third album 'Girl Violence': "I truly broke up with the concept that I should be writing for anyone but myself."

Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Conor Cunningham
Published: 12 September 2025

There is an old cliche that goes something along the lines of sometimes you need your whole life to fall apart before you can get on the right path. It is a journey that informed the creation of the third album from King Princess - real name Mikaela Straus - Girl Violence, out today.

Straus’s music career officially kicked off in 2018 with the single ‘1950’, a top 30 hit in Australia and platinum accredited in the US, but her talent had been noticed 10 years earlier when a major record label offered her a deal when she was just 11, which she refused, wanting to first understand who she was an artist.

Her first album Cheap Queen was released in 2019 and she garnered critical and commercial acclaim - she has racked up an impressive one billion global streams - for her pop coded sound that fuses electropop, indie and rock. Her second album Hold On Baby emerged in 2022 amongst a raft of singles, including collaborations with Mark Ronson, Sigrid, Griff and Boyish, and last year her cover of of the Steely Dan song ‘Dirty Work’ featured in the award winning comedy series Hacks.

After being signed to a major label for most of her career, Straus recently walked away from the deal, which was coupled with a growing dissatisfaction with life in her home of seven years, Los Angeles. “I was not loving
life,” she says. “I didn't feel grounded at all. I realised my feet were dangling for years.” She openly admits she was at a place where it was difficult to make important decisions about her life, and opted to upend her life completely and return to her home city, Brooklyn, New York. It was a decision that turned everything around for her. “Once I was back in the arms of the city I love, I started to feel easier and lighter about hard decisions that were actually in my best interest,” she says.

It is this reclamation of self that informs the album, not just in the form of a homecoming, but at discovering new sides of romance after the end of a long term relationship. Throughout it all Straus explores the duality of, and her fascination with, women.

“Women are both amazing and sinister—including myself—and it's my curiosity to understand all the love, loss, and changes that come out of my love for women,” she says. “Why are we so inclined to cause and receive chaos? If you've experienced even an iota of it, then you'll have a story to tell. And these are mine.”

Girl Violence brings an intriguing soundscape with it, and while it is perhaps less pop focused then some of her previous records, it is a truly intriguing and mesmerising collection of songs that both connect and are sonically fascinating and engaging.

Title track ‘Girl Violence’ opens the album and with its swirling, slightly off kilter sound, in many ways symbolises the personal turmoil that preceded the album’s creation. ‘Well you’ve got issues’ are the first words of the song, which could just as much be a reference to herself or someone else in her life, before the admission of ‘I’m tired of crying / I’m tired of trying.’

The second track ‘Jaime’, created in just four hours, is an album standout, if not for the shimmering, electronic sound then for Straus’s husky vocal that perfectly embodies both the hurt and desire in the lyrics as she sings of Jaime, the mean girl, that she actually lusts after. ‘You’ve been patiently waiting to hate me…Jaime I’ve been secretly wishing you’d date me’. It is a delicious, confusing track that perfectly reflects teenage desire wrapped in in a low key but ultimately addictive sound.

Straus’s journey back to self is documented on the indie pop ‘Origin’, on which she drawls ‘It’s been a little rough for a minute…I’m starting to feel myself again’, and the following track ‘I Feel Pretty’. Set to perky guitar-pop Straus is finally at a place of peace after returning home: “for the first time in years I feel pretty…the sun in the sky feels amazing.

The swaggering rock of ‘Get Your Heart Broken’ explores the juxtaposition of love and sex - the unrelenting drive to chase what you know is ultimately bad for you. ‘Give me your number - now…Fuck around and get your heart broken.’

The sultry, slow burn of third single ‘Girls’, with Straus displaying the beautiful rasp in her voice again, explores a similar theme as she grapples with the concept of letting someone back in even though she knows it spells trouble. ‘To let you back in / That would be violence / Yeah that would be chaos / I want to try it’.

‘Slow Down and Shut Up’ - about sexting from a tour bus bunk - is another standout track with a glorious, 1980s inspired synth sound combined with guitar. It has perhaps the most gorgeous chorus on the album as it reverses ‘pop chorus convention’ by amping up the sound but with Straus dropping the vocals down to a lower, quieter register, which perfectly reflects the intimacy of the lyrical subject matter: ‘it’s you that I want’.

The album ends with ‘Serena’, with a soundscape that harkens back to the opening track ‘Girl Violence’, neatly tying the album together. Pared back and ethereal with the occasional jarring splash of electric guitars it is an ode to someone who has helped Straus on her journey - ‘you have moved me and helped me laugh’ - the repeated line ‘Not everybody loves like this’ ends the song.

Girl Violence was born from a place of melancholy, and while there are moments when that shines through, ultimately it is an album that leaves you with a sense of joy, empowerment and embracing of life. Following the story of Straus’s journey is both provocative and thought provoking and her honesty and vulnerability, teamed with songs that consistently hit in just the right place make this an album to savour, and arguably one of Straus’s finest moments. Jett Tattersall recently caught up with Straus to talk through the creation of this gem.

Hi Mikaela, so lovely to talk to you today and congratulations on this gorgeous creature Girl Violence. What a beautiful sonic fairground it is.
Oh, thank you. I so appreciate that.

I want to go straight into title track, because in ‘Girl Violence’ you sing ‘nobody mentions that girls can be violent’ and of course it plays testament to the album as a whole. Talk me through a little bit about that, and how it then shaped the album as a whole.
That concept of girl violence really wasn't foreign to me. I have written about girl violence, the subliminal emotional evil of women, including myself since I've started writing music. I feel like my summation of how I would describe being a gay person, and what that's been like, has been girl violence! When that lyric came out, I was like, wow, that's the mission statement of this record. Nobody mentions girls can be violent and I hate it, but I kind of like it.

When that happened, I was like now I have a thesis for my record. There's so many different forms of girl violence that I talk about on this record, like friendship, working relationships, romantic relationships, with yourself. And then there's the beautiful side to it, that's tender and kind. As a writer, when you have an idea like that, it gives you some direction. It's not a new concept for me, it's not a concept album, but at least it was a directional pull towards the stories of this record, they are about girl violence and I start off with a question, and I want to end at some point with some form of answer.

I feel like you're running through so many sonic worlds here, we've got pop, we've got indie rock, you got this drunken waltz as well. And it feels the violence of empathy, that emotional intelligence that all humans have, but women, maybe it goes back to our own need for self preservation, we seem to be just so more in tune to it and even the joyful elements can be taken as violent because they're so severe.
Yeah, I agree, that was a beautiful way to put it. At the end of the day, there is the ability to have empathy also is the same ability that is used to be cruel, you know? And that's interesting to me, as non male people, because it's really not specifically about any type of womanhood, especially because I am pretty much a part time woman! There is a voyeuristic element to this too, where I'm also like, I'm kind of a woman, sometimes, like, in drag! Women and ladies, our ability to have empathy is so deep, and only people who can feel that deep, can be that cruel. So that, to me, was interesting. I've seen it, I've done it, we've all done it. We've all learned someone and then found their weakness, and there's a choice to be made. Do you take the weakness and turn it into this wound that you're pouring salt in, or do you love and cherish and empathise with it? And it can be a hard line, right? When you're in love and when things get complicated, it can be a hard line to not get mean. That was always just really interesting to me. I'm sure straight people have their own version of this with men, but I feel like this is a specific version that is applicable to queer people!

Apart from this album being spiritual, spooky and sneaky, you have also referred to it as breaking up with your life. I was curious if you feel your songwriting has shifted, or what have you broken up with as an artist, from where you were?
As far as my songwriting, I truly broke up with the idea of this concept that I should be writing for anyone but myself. I really just wanted to stop doing that, stop worrying about who is listening and just think about what I want to say. That really is the place that I wrote my first music from and that is very much the type of writer that I am. I'm writing for a catharsis, I'm writing as a form of therapy, that I've been really blessed to have my whole life.

My old life was living in LA, signed to a major label, and shit was not working, like at all. It was not inspiring. The type of unadulterated creativity that I like to have in my songwriting, a lot of that has to do with trusting myself and trusting my lyricism and my musicianship, and nothing about my life was making me feel like that was a fucking possibility. So moving back to New York and signing to an indie [label], to me, is really beautiful, because I always wanted to know it was like on the other side, if the grass is greener. Is it more about art over there? Is it a bunch of music nerds working together? Are there less graphs? And the answer is, yes!

You built this album with a very tight knit crew, what did that musical independence, and also collaboration, unlock for you creatively on this album?
Well, first of all, I made this album without any label, indie or major. The last time I did this was when I made the first EP Make My Bed, the last time I really made music with no-one listening was then. I thought to myself, what was that like for me? Being 18, 19, in a new city, meeting people, going to work every day from college and just writing because I wanted to. First of all, it's not a rotating cast, it's having the same two people go on the journey with you, that’s really special and evokes an era of making music that I really love, when a band would lock out a studio and that's what it is, you're making a record in the studio right now.

I really wanted to do that. I found my two guys. The first day we were all together we wrote ‘Jaime’, which felt kind of kismet, right? It’s one of my favourite songs I've written in a long time, because I was with these two guys. As far as the space, I wanted to work at my dad's studio because, A, it's accessible - It ain't cheap, but it's accessible - and B, I know that studio. That studio is my earliest stage. I know the ins and outs of that room, and I know the equipment that's in there, and it’s really in this era of feeling free and feeling unrestricted and feeling unwatched. So it all kind of aligned in that way, and I just did my thing.

The whole album sounds to me like these very different deliveries. You have alt rock swagger, these heady waltzes you have on ‘Girls’. How do these shifting deliveries and melodies serve the core story of girl violence?
I do feel like each song really is its own time capsule of itself. Going back to my first album Cheap Queen, I really have always written cross genre. Genre is really not important to me at all. I think it's boring, and I don't want a record that sounds like 14 of the same songs. In telling the story, if the production of the song is like the gown and the song itself is like the body, how you drape that body is how you're going to walk out of the house that day. With a lot of these songs, the writing of the song itself did shape the production and shape the vibe. It's almost like a colour for each That to me is how you tell this story. A song, like ‘Girls’ is very much when you're laying in bed and you're like, ‘God, what the fuck just happened?’ It feels very blue and very like dream like, whereas, ‘Cry Cry Cry’ is fiery, there's this redness and this anger, and the production sounds like that. And the ‘Origin’, for me, feels like walking down the streets of New York with your headphones in, seeing everything but not really hearing it. It's almost like the Fiona Apple video for ‘Across The Universe’, where everything's fucking breaking around her and she's just singing to the camera, that's how that feels to me.

You also said about this record that it was a celebration of the craziness of femininity in admiration and the derangement, which is just delicious.
I was very stoned when I wrote that! I have to hit the right amount of stoned to give a good interview. Not stoned enough, and I sound illiterate. Too stoned and I sound illiterate, so there's like a sweet spot.

That celebration on the craziness of femininity, what does that look like in your everyday life?
Oh, god, it's all around me. I hang out with a bunch of crazy gays. So my life is that, the stories you would not believe, it is out of control. I love the drama, I love being around my girls and them telling me what the fuck is happening. It's really cool. I think the chosen family is the most important thing in the world. I grew up in a house with a mother who had a lot of friends and a lot of people coming in and out. It was about community, and it was about sitting on the couch and gabbing. And that's what my life looks like. I have a bunch of dumb idiots and we sit around and smoke weed and gab. And of course, shit comes up, relationships, breakups, drama, friendships and we're each other's sounding boards, voices of reasons, and sometimes voices of not reason. I live a very lucky life, and I'm surrounded by so much beautiful, interesting love and chaos. I get to be there for my friends, they get to be there for me and I think that's really special.

It's something that I would like to put forth to the queer community, because in this world right now, it's really easy to feel alone and isolated and stuck on the internet and not knowing where to turn, frustrated and angry. But what we do really well as a queer community is we find our chosen family. That's what we do, that's what we've done for thousands of years. We find the people that make us sing, make us laugh. That to me is so interesting and cool and I just I want this record to feel like that. I want it to feel like when I'm singing it on stage, that I'm just gabbing with my girls.

Girl Violence is out now via section 1 / Mushroom Music. You can buy and stream here.
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