Kučka Is Writing For Herself
She’s worked with heavy hitters including Kendrick Lamar, ASAP Rocky and Flume — but now the Australian producer is doing for herself
This story was originally published in The Guardian.
Sunlight pours through the window of Laura Jane Lowther’s bedroom in Los Angeles, catching a gold record that hangs unassumingly in the corner. Recognising her input on 2015 hit Walk With Me from Australian duo Cosmo’s Midnight, the plaque seems like a lifetime ago for the Australian songwriter, producer and vocalist also known as Kučka (a moniker lifted from the Serbian slang for “bitch”).
In the time since that record came out, Lowther has become known as a prized collaborator who has featured on, written toplines for or been sampled by heavy hitters including Kendrick Lamar, Vince Staples, ASAP Rocky and the late electronic trailblazer Sophie — but it’s perhaps with fellow antipodean, Flume, that’s she’s achieved the most local success, performing and co-writing on multiple records including the Grammy-winning Skin.
Yet Kučka remains something of an underground phenomenon as a solo artist, especially in Australia where the overwhelming majority of top-tier electronic producers are men. But on the cusp of releasing her debut album, Wrestling, Lowther — responsible for helping so many others strike gold — is finally ready to bask in her own light.
Lowther grew up in Liverpool before a dramatic sea change in her teenage years catapulted her to Perth. She started out writing angsty, alternative indie music inspired by PJ Harvey before discovering GarageBand, and building her own MIDI controller for a uni assignment. Since then, she’s become a regular face in recording studios around the world.
“It’s usually a dudefest,” she laughs, of the typical recording session she attends in LA, where she moved a few years ago. “I’ve gone into a few sessions where it’s been one guy in the room and he immediately jumps on to the computer to produce, even though there’s a few other people who can do it. We’re like, ‘Oh, can we also get in on that?’ And he says, ‘Oh, sorry.’ It’s not even malicious. It’s more of an assumption.”
Despite often having to elbow her way to the front, Lowther remains in high demand as a producer — and had to carve out time away from collaborating to write an LP for herself. “I had to say ‘Absolutely no vocal features’ while I was finishing the record, no matter how good the opportunity was,” she says. One of those missed chances include a personal request from K-pop juggernauts BTS. “They asked ‘Can you write something for this?’” Lowther says, laughing. “And I was like, ‘I need to finish this random, ambient track that hardly anyone will care about … ’”
Lowther — who has won the best experimental category at the Western Australian music awards — is accustomed to the fringes, anyway. Her ear for the ethereal and unusual is present on lead singles Ascension and Drowning, where densely packed productions boldly claw at the edges of how electronic music should sound. It’s this obsession with new textures and an ability to conjure a cornucopia of sound that has made her name in producer circles; it also piqued the curiosity of LuckyMe, the Scottish tastemaker label home to super-producers including Hudson Mohawke and Baauer, which signed her in 2019.
“I think the mood of the production is equally as important as the lyrics,” she says. “Sometimes I’ll have a track that technically sounds fine. But like, there’s something missing … I’ll be like, ‘It needs a rhythm. What if I get this random sample from my electric car window?’
“That’s kind of why I love music as a medium, because it’s abstract. And you can make someone feel something that’s way more complex than if you just spoke to [them]. When I’m making something I always ask, ‘Why is it a song?’ You know, why is not a poem?”
Wrestling is also more personal for Lowther, with lyrics that detail seismic changes in her life, including coming out to her family, moving to the US, and marrying her wife, Dillon, who serves as her creative director. “For this [album], if it felt like I was writing it in a diary, then that was it,” she says. The title track, for instance, details a difficult conversation she had about her sexuality with her grandmother, whose struggle to parse the news is reflected in the song’s climax: “You’re wrestling / You say you believe it / Fighting for it / Shamed into believing.”
“I have such a good relationship with her that I was not expecting her to be shocked about me telling her that I was with a woman,” Lowther says now. “That moment was sort of like a catalyst for me to realise how much stuff we are conditioned to, that we react to without even thinking. It was almost like observing myself.”
The electronic music landscape has shifted dramatically since Kučka started noodling around in her Perth bedroom, with more female writer-producers celebrated as pop pioneers, from Christine and the Queens to Charli XCX. “A lot of more experimental production has become mainstream, which is so cool,” Lowther says. “Previously a lot of people got their music from the radio, and they want a singular mood per station. Now I think it’s more common to get music from streaming playlists, and YouTube, all of the above at the same time.”
It presents a particular opportunity for Lowther, whose best compositions often present like a diverse playlist crammed into three minutes. Wrestling sounds like nothing else out of Australia this year, which shouldn’t be surprising given that its author is a conduit for the most cutting-edge sounds in the world. Perhaps she should clear some more space on her wall.
