When Mikaela Straus, aka the cult indie-pop star King Princess, hit a roadblock while making her latest album, her solution was to run away to Hollywood. “That job was such a f**king lifesaver,” she says. “I felt so incredibly refreshed after it – it brought me closer to the music.”
“That job” was a gig opposite Nicole Kidman in the second series of Nine Perfect Strangers, the Prime Video thriller, in which Straus, a deadpan New Yorker with a distinctive shock of curly hair, plays a former piano prodigy haunted by her past.
“Something magical happens when you’re playing a fictional character,” she says. “By doing so, you’re also very much exploring parts of yourself. Music is this exploration of self. But with acting it’s different. You’re doing it via someone else, which allows you to go even deeper, because it’s less personal at moments. You have a buffer.
“Whereas the music is extremely personal, and it can be hard to get to that honesty and that sincerity and to trust yourself to go there. I ended up working in a notebook, figuring out who this character is. I took all of those lessons with me back to making the record.”
READ MORE
Straus has hovered at the edges of the big time since 2018, when she released her debut single, 1950. The tune combined old-timey songwriting values with a queer coded Valentine to a lover; she sounded, in the most fantastic sense possible, like a Snapchat Shirley Bassey.
It put her name up in lights: Rolling Stone proclaimed Straus “an untamed pop queen”; Mark Ronson, the Amy Winehouse producer, persuaded her to sign to his in-house label at Sony. Harry Styles retweeted the lyrics. A viral star was born.
But even the brightest star can lose its shine. That’s what happened to Straus in 2023, when, like a gift from the universe, Nine Perfect Strangers came along. She had been deep in the trenches with her third long player, Girl Violence, a cathartic unpacking of a series of life-changing break-ups. Straus had just split from the long-term girlfriend who had served as the lodestar for her previous album, Hold on Baby. Just as significantly, she parted ways with Sony Records.
[ King Princess: Hold On Baby review — Strap yourself in for a boisterous rideOpens in new window ]
She poured all that pain and turmoil into the gauzy indie bangers that make up the new LP. The record isn’t just an exploration of personal pain, however. It is also a concept album, of sorts, about how women can turn on each other.
“It’s about girl violence. In a world of very outward, masculine violence, there’s this underlayer of feminine, emotional violence that is always happening as well. And that, to me, is interesting. Being a part of the lesbian community, being a part of the queer community, I feel like we’re so familiar with that chaos. We are experts in breaking each other’s hearts.”
Women “fight with words, not fists”, she says – a concept she unpacks on the slow-rush onslaught of the title track, where she squares up to a woman who has betrayed her (“Well, f**k me, I thought we were friends / But you stay pretending”).
“My music has always been about heartbreak. [About] putting a name to the actual concept of how we emotionally batter each other. It’s not specific to gay people, but I do think we’re experts at it. We are kind of incredible arbiters of chaos.
“The lesbian community is a dramaville. It felt apt and felt fitting to put a name to the concept that is so familiar to all of us. It doesn’t have to be romantic. Friendships, working relationships, it’s all girl violence.”
She is proud of 1950, a bittersweet love letter to the United States’ golden era, inspired by the secret gay life of Patricia Highsmith, the author of The Talented Mr Ripley. In the lyrics she expresses the wish that she and her significant other could settle down and live a life of suburban bliss, the way people used to in the good old days (“I love it when we play 1950”).
The dark joke at the heart of the song is, of course, the fact that the real 1950s were anything but a halcyon time for gay people. There was another twist that King Princess didn’t see coming. Seven years on from its release, 1950 feels less like a Valentine than a postcard from a different era. Look how far her country has regressed since then.
“We are in the dawn of full-blown fascism, and we have a f**king dictator in office,” she says. “To be a queer person in this country right now, it’s a tough bag.”
When Sony signed her, she expected she’d be on a major label the rest of her life. She now feels that the industry has changed, however, and that big labels have less clout than they did.
“I couldn’t be happier on an indie,” she says. “It’s a misconception that indies don’t have money. They actually do. If you look at who are the top artists in the world right now, a lot of them aren’t even signed directly to majors. They’re signed to imprints,” the way Taylor Swift and Hozier are, for example.
“The system has changed. You used to sign to a major to get the big budgets and the firepower behind you. It doesn’t work like that any more. They can’t pull the same strings as they used to. Everyone’s at a loss because of TikTok and all that type of s**t. I might as well be at a place that is just about the art.”
Straus was raised in Brooklyn, where her father, Oliver, runs a recording studio, Mission Sound. Further back, her family were New York old money – so old that the wealth had long since passed into history by the time she came along. All that her ancestors left her was the name Straus and a fascinating history that included her great-grandparents Isidor and Ida Straus going down with the Titanic. They feature in James Cameron’s 1997 movie: we see Ida refusing a lifeboat and embracing her husband as the waters come rushing in.
King Princess has gone back and forth about how she feels about her Straus heritage. People hear “Titanic” and leap to conclusions about gilded-age millionaires with diamond-topped canes and about intergenerational wealth and privilege. As it happens, Straus attended a fancy Manhattan high school with a $60 million campus – but as a scholarship student. Believe her when she says King Princess did not grow up like royalty.
“I have really no affiliation with that side of my family, the Strauses. It’s so disjointed. We don’t know, actually, a lot of people who are related to us. It’s mostly me and my dad and his sister, I don’t know any other Strauses. It all feels very distant. But then to think about that time period. I saw a TikTok the other day, a rendering of what [Isidor and Ida’s] room on the Titanic looked like. I was, like, ‘Oh God, so luxury, so cool’.”
Her father’s work running a studio meant she grew up around music; he was a fan of Led Zeppelin and T Rex, and he has worked with everyone from Jack White to the Taylor Swift producer Jack Antonoff. She also adored Harry Potter; for her last birthday she threw a Hogwarts-themed party and went dressed as the villainous Voldemort. But if potty about Potter, she is not a fan of JK Rowling and disagrees, to put it mildly, with the British writer’s gender-critical views.
“F**k you, bitch,” she says when Rowling’s name is brought up. She argues that Rowling’s opinions are not simply upsetting to trans people but are a betrayal of the Harry Potter books and her message about being the best version of yourself.
“You know what the irony is? She wrote eight books about children having autonomy and the ability to make their own choices, which is possibly the most trans thing I’ve ever heard.”
She wishes that Rowling had stayed off social media and let her books speak for her. “She could have had these books go down as some of the greatest young-adult writing in the world – all she had to do was shut the f**k up …
“The majority, I would say, of Harry Potter freaks and fans – queer. Because it’s a queer story: it’s about choice and difference and finding your community and chosen family. These are all very queer themes ...
“It is basically spitting in the space of your fandom. I think she is a demon of a woman. That being said, I still love Harry Potter.”
King Princess kicks off the European leg of the Girl Violence tour at Vicar Street, in Dublin, in December. She wasn’t originally supposed to play Ireland – the tour was scheduled to open in Glasgow two days later. But she was politely taken to task while working on Nine Perfect Strangers by the series’ Dublin-born director, Anthony Byrne.
“We became so close on that show and stayed friends,” she says. “And he was, like, ‘No Ireland show?’ I specifically requested that Ireland be on the tour. I’m excited to come back. Insanely excited.”
Girl Violence is released via Section1. King Princess plays Vicar Street, Dublin, on Wednesday, December 3rd
