There’s an urgency to Kassie Krut’s sound that makes you feel enviably alive. The thirty-something year old narrators, emerging from the beloved Philly-based math rock gig Palm, have traded in their guitars and formal band dynamics for the synthesizer, melting an industrial, electronic sound that’s simultaneously mesmerizing and disheveling. Novelty isn’t their goal, but manifestly, convention isn’t either.
Ex-Palm members Kasra Kurt and Eve Alpert, alongside long-time contributor and Palm’s Nicks and Grazes producer, Matt Anderegg, settled in New York to design the trio’s first project — a self-titled, staggeringly alive inception suffusing inspirations of UK dub, grime, and hyperpop. Kassie Krut, although a debut, is nonetheless a product of decades of experience. From Kurt and Alpert’s teenage years in the London music scene to Palm’s 11-year stint, Kassie Krut proves that while forming a band with the people you love is meaningful, it’s even more so the second time around.
“Reckless”, the end-of-year list abound single, carries out the band’s irreverent tone not entirely dissimilar to the trio’s bearing in person. The pop anthem’s speak-singy introduction is urging to be spelled out for you, repeating itself over and over again despite its haunting memorability: “If you ask me who I wanna be/Im’a spell it out so it’s plain to see/K-A-S-S-I-E-K-R-U-T-T-T-T.”
There’s a clear line of chaos that runs throughout each track, despite the band’s ethos of minimalism in writing. With that, the high-energy electronics and accompanying dead-pan, chanting harmonies meld together seamlessly, making it impossible not to dance to. From their manifesto of satirical self-assurance in “Reckless” to the combination of harsh bass drops and translucent vocals in “Racing Man,” you might find yourself wanting to create a new band, bend an entire genre of body music, rip it all up, and start again.
Despite the rush in Kassie Krut’s sonics, there wasn’t much from the group to meet me in a corner booth at a very dark TV Eye, the venue of the release show in Ridgewood, NY. Waiting as they trickled in post-soundcheck, I was met with aloofness. Joined by just Alpert and Anderegg, two-thirds of Kassie Krut are represented in our conversation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I’m just going to go for it. Get straight into it. Palm split up in 2023, but even before that, Kasra has been releasing music as Kassie Krut since 2020. Despite this, in what ways is Kassie Krut an entirely new chapter for you guys as musicians, and as people?
EA: It’s very different. We live in New York now. We don’t play rock instruments at all anymore, and the way we wrote was all improvising in a practice space, just going back and forth trying to come up with the next part of a song. Now, the way we write music is all on the computer — it’s a lot more streamlined. We don’t have to meet at the same time and write loud music for hours, but we can play loud music on the computer. There’s a lot of flexibility.
You guys don’t necessarily have defined roles like you did in Palm. There’s no sole guitarist, or drummer, etc. What does this open up for you as a trio?
EA: It’s very liberating — we are like a fifty man band because you can come up with any sounds, you can go in any direction, even genre wise. It feels limitless.
At what point did Kassie Krut transition from a solo project of Kasra’s to one that included the both of you?
EA: Pretty quickly, well it was a solo project, but not a very active one. Kasra wasn’t really performing shows, so it was sort of just like an idea in the back of his mind that he wanted to open it up to a band. Palm was all encompassing, and just, like, hard. It was hard to have two brains for that. Right when Palm ended — Matt was our producer — we slipped into this project.
Yeah, Matt, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about producing. You guys have said that you value and practice minimalism in your writing of electronic music, as it can naturally be pretty easy to build and layer sonics to make a lot of noise. How do you bring minimalism into this project, and why do you prioritize it?
MA: The idea is the fewer sounds you have, the louder it sounds. The purpose is to get the sound to feel — as much as possible — immediately in your face. The more things you layer, the further you get away from that.
EA: I totally agree with you. When things get really loud, or where there’s a lot of tracks and a lot of elements in a song, it starts to flatten out. When you listen to music, you realize it becomes way punchier when you have less going on.
In terms of texture, do you consider yours new? Is novelty even a goal?
MA: Novelty is not a goal. Having the sound be a part of the music is a way for the textures to sort of participate in the composition. That is one of the goals, and for our textures to have an impact emotionally on the listener — this is the intention. It’s dangerous to chase newness or novelty.
EA: It’s always interesting when you hear stuff you don’t recognize in music. But also, I hear sounds that sound completely modern and other-worldly that are very old or from a past generation. It’s about listening out for those sounds and trying to emulate, or think about what makes them so interesting and how you can apply that to your own music. But newness is not necessarily exciting to me. It’s not going to be new forever, only until it’s old.
MA: Nothing sounds like Joe Beats, still.
Speaking of that, what are some of the artists you do look to emulate? I hear a lot of SOPHIE in your music, but I could just be projecting my love for her.
MA: SOPHIE, yeah. Legend.
EA: Yeah. It runs the gamut. We love so much different music, but are never trying to emulate someone directly. Well, actually, sometimes we are trying to emulate sounds directly.
MA: It ends up being a good practice trying to replicate something. It’s usually very hard, or maybe we’re just not quite good enough at synthesis to be able to perfectly replicate anything. But it ends up being a good jumping off point.
EA: A lot of industrial music. We love older dubstep, or earlier dubstep, grime, punk, I guess, and even pretty folk music. I’m trying to think of what I’ve been listening to recently. I’ve been listening to Robert Wyatt again, but I don’t think we sound like Robert Wyatt at all. He’s got such a beautiful voice and a sense of humor. I think humor or a lightheartedness in music is really hard to achieve, and that is what I love about his.
I would say you guys achieve it in Racing Man. That is what I love about “Reckless”, just how menacing your tone of voice is. The indirect humor throughout is refreshing. People take themselves too seriously, especially underground music heads, I think.
EA: Hah. I think so, yeah.
I’m curious about how you guys play your music live. I guess I’ll find out in about an hour, but how does that work? Is it difficult to replicate your sound for a live audience?
MA: It’s not hard to replicate. Maybe it’s hard to feel like we’re putting on a compelling show. I think one of the big differences between electronic and rock is that if you’re in a band, you practice in a band, you write your songs together, you even practice before you go into the studio, and then you know how to play all of the songs by the time you’ve recorded them. But for us it doesn’t work that way. We don’t use instruments to write music, and so we have to learn how to play the songs. I learned one of the songs we’re playing tonight like five days ago, and I haven’t practiced it that many times. Maybe you’ll notice it.
EA: And at the moment, we aren’t using a ton of live instrumentation because we aren’t emulating the music from scratch. We are adding onto it, playing with it.
MA: I’m playing all of the drum sounds right now, I learned how to play the beats. But then there’s backing tracks that play the instruments, and Kasra has prepared guitar and percussion that isn’t on the record. Kasra and Eve switch off on that. It’s weird. They’re usually not super hard to learn, but they’re hard to make sound really good. It can sound sloppy really easily. We are definitely still figuring out the best way to do it, especially without having a big budget.
Speaking of that, and just with the music industry right now in general, I assume it’s difficult to maintain a full band. How is it navigating this?
EA: Oh, not good. It’s always been pretty bad for the majority of people making music. It’s difficult — we don’t make money. I guess this is the most direct way to put it. You have got to make peace with why you’re doing this, and money shouldn’t be at the top of your list.
MA: I can’t think of a grand answer.
What is at the top of your list?
EA: Um, joy. (laughs)
MA: Making music that we like. (laughs) ★
