Kiki T has released Aqua Obscura, a five-track EP about the point where a woman stops believing the life she was raised to want, available now on leading streaming platforms.

Like her previous EP, this one takes its titles from water, and each one is set at a different distance from shore. Aqua Eterna stayed in the shallows, the bottom still under your feet and visible through the water, written at the point where a woman starts noticing the story she's been given doesn't hold water, and clings to it anyway.

"Aqua Eterna means never-ending water. It's at the core of who you are, and I also think of it as your purest state," Kiki T says. "Eterna really became about that first step away from what we all believe the perfect fairytale of life is supposed to be. It's when you first make your way out and start to see that some things aren't exactly right, but you're still holding onto the story you've been fed."

Aqua Obscura is written from much further out, past the depth where your feet find anything solid. The freedom out there comes with an undertow, and she treats the two as the same water.

"In Aqua Obscura, we've left the shore. We've left behind the box, the home base. We've given up the illusion and now we're wandering," she says. "We're in over our heads and we're kind of just living with it. The water is dark, and that's exciting and treacherous and confusing, and we might just live here now. This is where sirens go, but we're not a siren yet. We're still figuring out what we are."

That condition is the whole record. The shore is behind her, the illusion is gone, and nothing has surfaced to take its place, which leaves five songs that raise questions and then decline to answer them. She built the EP to float out there instead of swimming back, and she sounds settled enough in the dark water to stay in it.

Dark tropipop is Kiki T's own term for what she makes, coined for a sound that keeps tropical brightness on the surface while the writing underneath goes somewhere much colder. Aqua Obscura is where she runs the politics through it. The production stays dreamy and cinematic, in the lane of an artist like Lana Del Rey, bright enough to play loud in a car with the windows down while the lyrics take apart the life the listener was promised.

"I'm super excited about this EP because I feel like we're really starting to dive into what I think is one of the most original and authentic pieces of my style, which is this dark tropipop thing AND this feminist thing I've been trying to write about without being a bummer," she says.

The illusions on the record don't come apart one at a time. Kiki T names all of them in a single breath, one for every song on the EP.

"I think the songs really live in that moment when the illusion ends and you start questioning all the things you were taught to want or believe in," she says. "The beautiful life of money, beauty, legacy and glamour. The idea that love has to be permanent to be meaningful. The idea that women are crazy while the men calling them crazy keep coming back for more. The way we shame women for owning or selling their image while still grooming them for marriage instead of power. Even the fairytale of that first huge love, when you finally realize the castle you thought you were building was made out of sand the entire time."

Only one song puts a body in actual water. "Night Swim" opens the EP on the last night of a trip, with an invitation that arrives with its own rules attached and a woman who has no intention of following anybody home or saving anybody's name to her phone. Permanence never enters the negotiation. She takes what the night is worth and leaves the rest of it on the beach, and the song makes a decent case that this is the more honest arrangement.

A stranger handed her "Beautiful Life." He had never married, never wanted children, and planned to spend every dollar he earned before he died. His favorite place on earth was Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in the South of France, and he told Kiki T about a near-drowning that clarified for him how he wanted to die. She wrote the song about everything he had, which is the luxury version of a life sold to everybody, and about the part of it she couldn't stop circling.

Patience runs out on "Still Psycho." A man calls a woman crazy when he's lost his grip on her, which makes the word a tool rather than an observation. It gets her dismissed and leaves her second-guessing herself. More usefully for him, it gets him out of having to answer for anything. The men using it in this song keep coming back for more, and Kiki T lets that contradiction sit where everyone can see it.

Underneath everything else sits "Castles," the first love that breaks a person badly enough to set off every realization on the rest of the EP. What looked like a fortress on the beach turns out to have been sand the entire time, and the tide does what the tide does. It arrives fourth, three songs deep into the aftermath, which means the record works backward toward its own origin instead of forward from it.

Nothing in her catalog goes as far as the final track which is the song she's proudest of. The title is a deliberate spin on the subscription platform where women sell access to content on their own terms, and the writing came from watching the same fight play out online every day.

"Every day I go on social media and see countless accounts of men slut-shaming and hating women for joining," she says. "There's obviously a hugely exploitative and destructive side to the platform too, but I think the entire conversation around it shows how nearly impossible it still is for women to agency in our current world."

Neither available option leaves a woman with much. Kiki T lays out both and finds the same dead end waiting at the end of each one.

"On one hand, if you take control of your image, monetize it and game the system, you're seen as a pariah and a whore," she says. "On the other hand, if you fully adhere to our Puritan societal norms, you can put yourself in a powerless position where you allow the patriarchy to control you and crush your soul. Haha, but really though. So it begs the question: what is a woman actually allowed to be? What do we expect her to be?"

For Kiki T the question doesn't stop at the platform. It runs into how girls with every advantage available to them are still being raised, and into what the people raising them actually want at the end of it.

"If we're born into positions of privilege, affluence and access to resources, what do we hope for our daughters?" she says. "Do we hope they become CEOs and heads of industry, innovators, artists, powerhouses? Because from what I've seen, it still feels like we're grooming them to become wives. 'High-value' wives, specifically, which, excuse me, but what the hell is that?"

None of the five songs arrives at a verdict, which Kiki T says was the intent going in. She wrote them while the questions were still live for her.

"At the heart of it, Aqua Obscura is really about what we see when we give up our projection of the world and start seeing it for what it actually is. What does it mean to have a beautiful life?" she says. "The only way to really explore that question is to open your mind, meet new people and see how other people live. Sometimes what we learn becomes something we strive for, and sometimes we realize it's a cautionary tale for our own lives."

The uncertainty extends to her own read on her material, which she offers as a feature of the writing.

"I think that's also why it's difficult to really pin down what these songs are truly about. They're more like open questions. Questions I'm still trying to figure out as a writer and as a human, and ones I hope the listener enjoys sitting with too," she says.

The EP finishes where it started, out past the shore with the water still dark and no plan to swim back.

"Aqua Obscura doesn't try to solve the question of 'what now?' It kind of just sits in what is," Kiki T says. "And it's a pretty messed up, exciting place to be. I mean, if you're going to be wandering around in the dark, it's nice not to do it alone."

Kiki T is an independent artist from Los Angeles who grew up on Oahu. She left a doctoral program in cognitive neuroscience to make music and does her best writing in her parked car with the garage door shut and the lights off, a habit she describes as feeling like being underwater. Aqua Obscura is her second EP, following Aqua Eterna.

"Night Swim" and "Beautiful Life" were released ahead of the EP. Aqua Obscura is available now in full on Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. 

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Laurelanne Davis
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Author: Adam Bailey

Adam is a regular contributor for established press release distribution website Release-News.com. He writes on a wide range of topics including music.