KT Kink plays release show for new album at Stardust Video Credit: Photo by Matthew Moyer

Orlando gets a belated Christmas present from KT Kink in the form of a release show for her newest album, The Fog, out on Miami’s RIP Records.

The show is stuffed like a particularly angelic kid’s stocking with a wealth of Central Florida visionaries including Putrid Fauve, the all-star Shania Pain Bitch, Warm Frames and noise prodigal Milkman’s Molotov — and of course, KT Kink herself, playing a set heavy on these new darkling anthems.

This writer’s association with KT Kink goes back to lucking blindly into her first show and be- ing entranced with her raw take on EBM — filtered through the rough-and-tumble Central Florida punk underground — and the contemptuous confidence of her performance. And she’s only gotten better since.

But what of The Fog (which will be on sale in cassette form at this show)? While debut album Naivety will always be a sentimental favorite due to the closing strut of “Damn Fleas,” her new songs are more fully realized and complex, demanding repeat listens.

For the artist, it was a difficult suite of songs to place on magnetic tape. “Ideally, I would have strayed away from talking so much about mental health, and I had always wanted to avoid talking overly about relationships with friends, lovers,
etc. I felt like this release was so ‘woe is me, I’m so sad’ and I felt like that would be a turn-off to many people. I had to let that go, though,” says Kink. “Sometimes the only way you can cope with a difficult experience or grief is to express it outwardly or creatively. I’m very thankful for the people in my life that put up with me throughout this creative process because I’m sure I wasn’t the most cheerful person to hang out with.”

The Fog is truly harrowing. “The Child” is like “Things Fall Apart” in hell; “Tension” simmers with a guiding pulse-beat that follows the same psychic byways as Martin Rev; the trip-hop comedown of “The Fog” is an earworm that drains you emotion- ally by the song’s end. For her part, Kink credits the first Raincoats album as a guiding inspiration, and we hear those skeletal hymns embedded deep in The Fog’s DNA.

The album started, tellingly, as a series of diary entries. “I went through a phase of writing down everything that was emotionally impactful to me in a journal, and ended up filling a lot of pages with mostly embarrassing self-loathing gibberish. However, sometimes the words would come together in a beautifully cohesive way and eventually they began to tell a story I wanted to put to music,” says Kink about the album’s genesis. “Musically I wanted to attempt to keep things as minimalist
as possible and limit the sounds that I chose to work with. I was able to juxtapose that with some visceral screeching chaos in the track ‘Ketamine,’ that I guess represents the climax of the album.”

Hear that chaos both recorded and, especially, live this week. “Anger is OK to feel, and we need a way to express it healthily,” she concludes. “I’m still trying to figure that out, as I’m sure many of you are too.”

7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 27, Stardust Video & Coffee, 1842 E. Winter Park Road, stardustvideoandcoffee.wordpress.com, $10.

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This article appears in Dec 25-31, 2024.