Mikaela Strauss AKA US singer-songwriter King Princess: ‘I thought love was pain … then I began to ask why’

A viral debut made her the next big thing, but rather than repeat herself, she’s followed her heart. The New Yorker talks about the virtues of indie label life, and how her latest record takes on the ‘girl violence’ she sees in lesbian communities

Mikaela Strauss, the songwriter and producer who records as King Princess, describes her new album Girl& Violence as “almost like a ‘ha ha’ to toxic masculinity”, although not in& the way you may initially think. Informed by the drama and infighting that she suggests is inherent in many lesbian communities, Girl Violence touches on the idea that “in a world full of physical violence and anger and war and hypermasculinity, this is the really crazy violence that’s under the surface, that’s subliminal and emotional and thoughtful”, she says. She smirks a little, over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn: “You think that you’re the proprietor of the violence. [But] it’s the girls.”

Girl Violence is the third King Princess album, and the most fully formed. It represents something of a& clean break for 26-year-old Strauss, who went viral aged 19 with her debut single 1950, a plush but covertly bitter anthem about a complex queer romance. That single, released on Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig, broke through to the US charts and established Strauss as a pop sensation in waiting.