INTERVIEW: KYE drops new single 'Love Yourself' and announces her third EP 'Kylie's Rant' will be released 22 August: "Breaking the boundaries becomes a lot easier for me as I get older."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Published: 27 June 2025
British born Australian artist KYE (real name Kylie Chirunga) today drops her new single ‘Love Yourself’ and also announces her third EP Kylie’s Rant will be out on 22 August.
Written by KYE and Johnny Took of DMA’S, ‘Love Yourself’ takes KYE in a new sonic direction as she embraces a guitar driven, alternative pop sound - which include KYE herself playing the guitar.
“Lyrically, it was one of those moments where I started off writing about a friend; looking at him and being like, ‘You are this beloved person and people really love you, but they don’t know you,’”KYE says of the story behind the song. “Wearing that facade and knowing that it actually stresses him out, pretending that he is that person. It’s like, ‘If people actually knew you, you wouldn’t have to work at all for people to love you.’ The song goes into that thing of, ‘Well, if you actually loved yourself, then you would allow others to love you too’. It really resonates with me as well. Like, cut the bulls**t for once! Just be you! There’s no point in trying to be anything else. I’m so sick of trying to be cool. I needed to jump back on the self-love wagon a bit more.”
“Being in this industry for a while, you get good at being like, “What’s a good way for people to perceive me?” rather than going, “I’m just going to do the thing and it doesn’t matter if people love it or hate it,” KYE continues. “This song reminds me to just do the thing and stop being so worried about how it looks.”
‘Love Yourself’ follows on from the reflective, pop-rock of ‘29’ and the gorgeously uplifting ‘Gospel’. All three songs will feature on KYE’s third EP Kylie’s Rant which is due to be released on 22 August. The EP marks a sonic and lyrical progression from her last EP, 2023’s ARIA nominated upbeat pop Ribena and is her most personal and reflective work to date.
“Coming out of the last EP, which was a lot of fun and upbeat, finishing that era off and returning to this writing phase… the number one thing was that I wanted to write something that was true,” she says. “Not saying that any of my other music has been untrue, but I wanted something that felt deeply, deeply personal. Something that felt like an insight into my actual life and what’s been happening in my life.”
Beginning her music career as a backup singer for artists such as Jessica Mauboy and Sampa The Great, KYE launched her solo career in 2019 with the single ‘Good Company’. She has since released a swathe of impressive singles that cover garage, dance, pop with hints of R&B that has brought her much critical acclaim, culminating in an ARIA Award nomination for Best Soul/R&B release in 2023 for Ribena.
A truly engaging artist with a gorgeously warm, connective voice and music that takes you all the way from dance pop through to deeply reflective moments, KYE is proving just what a remarkable artist she is with each new release. Women In Pop recently sat down with KYE to find out more about this exciting new era in her music and the upcoming release of Kylie’s Rant.
Hi KYE, it is so good to see you again. I want to start by talking about new single ‘Love Yourself’. I know I've said this before when we spoke on Ribena, but I'm 100% into this song’s late 90s, turn of the century, rom com energy, which I just have so much time for!
Yes, that's absolutely the vibe! It's that coming of age movie, roll the end credit scene vibes.
Oh good, that's what you were going for! You have said it is your big guitar moment, and it is, but it's joyful guitar. It's like a big, feminine guitar moment, that's what I'm loving about it. What was it that unlocked that part of yourself creatively? Was there a specific memory or film or artist that made you go ‘this needs joyous rolling credits on a guitar’?
I always wrote music on guitar, especially prior to the whole Ribena phase. So it was more of a return to the way that I used to write music. I really just wanted to get back on instruments again and strip a bit of the production back and just try a bit of a different sound. It's kind of felt like going back to something more familiar, rather than trying something that's completely new. It's really been spurred on by just picking up my guitar and writing songs again from scratch, and not being in the studio, just being in my bedroom and writing something,
Your music, in the best possible way, so so pick and mix. You seem to just chase, not just a sound or a memory or a theme, but where the mood takes you, and you will go headlong into that mood. Which again, I just love it
Absolutely, I never really do the same thing again, because I'm always feeling a different thing at different stages of my life. I do like to dive head first into that feeling and there's no real sonic boundaries for me. I just don't really have to make the same thing over and over. Having changed sounds and genres already so early in my career, I have the freedom to just make anything. So I just go with what I'm liking and feeling and listening to at the time and just jump into that world and create that sonic world for myself.
We got to know you in a very dance-R&B-pop sphere, and now we're getting guitars, you've gone back to piano - but that's where you started. How have those years away from that sound strengthened your approach and your confidence to now lead with that stripped back sound?
I think it's that whole thing of distance makes the heart grow fonder. The less that I engaged with instruments and playing as much, the more I really missed doing that, and I really missed having that element in my live set. I'd been doing kind of the DJ vocal setup for a number of years now, and I just really missed the feeling of a kick drum behind me, you know? I was also really missing those tender moments with my audience where I really share a song in its rawest form. I just wasn't really getting as many of those moments doing the dance stuff. I was obviously really enjoying myself, I was having an absolute party, but I just really wanted to bring back some of those really tender moments that are really, really personal, and bring fans in on that part of my artistry again.
I love that. What I think you've done very beautifully is have those moments and that vulnerability and brought people in. But not with that weight of like, ‘okay, everyone, sit down. I'm now going to read you my diary’. There's still the humour, there's still the fun, you're still very much an artist and a performer, like everyone is, but I feel like you've really got your audience in mind when you create your music.
I think for me, the baseline for all of the music that I make, is that there's always joy, and I never want to take that out of my music, even if I'm singing about heartbreak or something that is a little bit heavier. I always find a way to incorporate that underlying joy. Because it's how I live my life, or how I try to live my life. Even in the hardships, there's always that moment of happiness and that sprinkle of sunshine. So keeping that playfulness and that fun vibe, even though the sound shifts, it's just me. It's just my personality creeping its way through the music. That's my ethos on life and music in general, is to keep that joy alive.
We’ve obviously got your third EP Kylie’s Rant that is coming in August. With this collection, there's a bit more of inviting people into who you are. It is a little bit more exposed, but with guitars and joy. How has it been for you discovering those bits of you and putting that vulnerability into the songs. Has it been actually a little bit confronting, or has it felt really good?
It's been both. It's been really confronting in the sense that I've always considered myself, especially over the last few years, more of a vocalist than anything else. So coming into the space and picking up instruments has been daunting, just because I've never considered myself to be a guitarist or to be a keys player. It's been really exposing to go, ‘this is what I do when no one's watching’, and bring that to the forefront. It's been really confronting, but honestly it's been just such a relief as well. Getting to share stories that I haven't previously shared in my music, and share some deeper feelings as well, but do it in such an exposed way where it's not so layered or covered up by production and it just forces me to be me. So it has been just this big release as well as terrifying!
And I mean, let's just say, it your title, Kylie's Rant. People have to buckle in! It does feel like the creative exhale, and maybe even a pissed off one too. Obviously, we have ‘Love Yourself’, how much of this EP is a love letter to yourself?
Almost all of it, I think it's an appreciation for where the journey has taken me. I had this whole year of not releasing music and not being on stage, and it really forced me to look at myself and go, am I proud of the things that I've done? Do I love where I am in my career? Do I love who I am as a person? Because you kind of do that split as an artist, where you go on, I'm Kylie and I'm KYE, and I love KYE, but I don't know if I love Kylie. A lot of this writing was just for me to actually get to a point with myself where I can go I do love what I'm doing, and I am proud of my achievements. And aside from all of that, I'm also just proud of myself as a person and the woman that I'm growing into. A lot of it is exploring those themes for me. The single ‘29’ was talking about how it feels for me to be coming up to the end of my 20s and enjoying that journey, and ‘Love Yourself’ really explores that feeling of forgetting the public perception of me, or forgetting being perceived as KYE and just stripping all of that back and just being Kylie. A lot of it is just me writing to myself, but hoping that it connects with other people as well as they hear that conversation with myself.
You've spoken in the past about pushing back against industry expectations, especially for young women, for soloists, for black artists. I imagine as a young female artist, it's tough to stand your ground. I was wondering how you've navigated it and what advice you would give to any other young artists carving out their own space in the machine?
Absolutely, I think the biggest one for me, especially talking to friends about it who are women in the industry, and specifically talking about when we change genres, is that anytime our male counterparts do it, it's really cool, it's like it is this amazing thing and has completely turned everything on its head, and here's 72 ARIA Awards for doing something totally different. And I think we as women, sometimes we aren't afforded the ability to explore and just do something different without people going ‘she's lost her mind, she can't stick to one thing’. And as a black artist, the expectation is that I'll make R&B, and I really never have. I think my first EP had a couple of R&B songs, but it's always been pop leaning. At the root of everything, when I make music, it's always mostly just pop with whatever I'm feeling and whatever rabbit hole I'm going down at the time. There's always that underlying pop sound.
For me, it's just always been it is what it is. I can't be something that I'm not, and I can't be an R&B artist even just to fit that mould, because it's just not the music that I make. In finding that authenticity for myself, I have had to let go of whatever the expectation is, and instead of trying to fit into whatever mould that could possibly make me more successful, or push me in a certain direction, I would rather just go with what I feel and what's in my heart. I think breaking the boundaries becomes a lot easier for me as I get older, and I become a lot more authentic, and I start to know myself a lot more. It's less about specifically trying to break that industry mould, and more trying to build up what's happening on the inside,
And you just do joyous pop so fucking well. Like, so well. Lastly, before I leave you, ‘Love Yourself’, I was on the money we are getting coming of age, romantic comedy, closing credits. If ‘Love Yourself’ was a film from our past, what is it?
Oh, my God, that is such an amazing question! I reckon love yourself is the end of Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It's the end of that. You skipped school, you've had this amazing, fantastical day, and it ends in all the romance and triumph.
‘Love Yourself’ is out now via Sony Music Australia. You can download and stream here.
Kylie’s Rant will be released on 22 August. You can pre-order and pre-save here.
Follow KYE on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Read our four page feature on KYE in issue 14 of Women In Pop magazine
