Ashnikko on self-love, radical joy, and celebrating sexual liberation on second album 'Smoochies' • Interview • DIY Magazine

The girls’ bathroom is something of a sacred place. Late-night conversations thrive within graffiti-strewn stalls, whether it’s to spill the messy details of a break-up, debrief about a hook-up at the back of the club, or hype up a total stranger’s outfit. It’s a sort of communion that can all take place in the space of five minutes, where performance drops and real community takes charge.

Ashnikko - the alias of North Carolina alt-pop disruptor Ashton Nicole Casey - has built her second album, ‘Smoochies’, around what this space represents. On ‘Itty Bitty’, the first single to be shared from the album, she asks: “Can you see my pussy? / Can you see my ass when I bend over?” While the line has been interpreted as a more provocative come-on, Ashnikko soon clarifies that this first introduction to her latest body of work was, in fact, inspired by the bathroom check-in.

“In the past, I shrouded a lot of my more sensual lyrics in euphemism. I’m very straight to the point, and I think it’s funny to be so direct. But I think people are misunderstanding that lyric, it’s in the same vein as leaving the bathroom and asking your friend if they can see your tampon string,” she tells DIY today. “I was actually just saying to my friend, ‘Oh my God, is my skirt too short? Can you see the puss? Do I need to pull my skirt down?’ The entirety of that song is bathroom conversations. Even though the sex is on the back burner on that, it’s more like, ‘my girlfriend just broke up with me, I’m getting finger-fucked in the back of the club, and I’m debriefing with my girlfriends’.”

Bringing these conversations into broad daylight feels particularly charged in an increasingly conservative climate. “It feels like I’m shaking my titties in the face of fascism,” she says when asked about the presence of sexual expression in her music. Growing up in North Carolina’s Bible Belt, watching her mother and grandmother navigate restrictive definitions of womanhood left its mark. “Watching my mom have to be this very palatable, submissive wife - I feel like my music is a direct reaction to that very patriarchal upbringing,” she explains. “I think it’s really important for me to express the fullness of my humanity in my music. Sex and sensuality can exist at the same time as grotesqueness.”

“Sex and sensuality can exist at the same time as grotesqueness.”

As someone who identifies as genderfluid, Ashnikko sees the current attacks on queer communities as rooted in this same fear of fluidity, of people refusing to fit into tidy binaries. “The people attacking them are just scared to acknowledge the truth within themselves,” she says. “They see other people experiencing the whole spectrum of humanity, and they take that as a direct attack on themselves.”

Finding radical joy in the face of oppression requires intent. “If you look at things on a macro scale, it’s so easy to feel overwhelmed and really hopeless,” she affirms. “We’re destroying the fucking planet, and we’re surrounded by evil, genocidal fascists in every corner.” Referencing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, which explores cultivating abundance, she offers a framework: “The best way to bring about any change is to focus on your own. Have a garden. Invest in your community, make small changes, and be a light to other people. My community is a musical one, and I feel like I have a lot of power with my music.”

That power manifests differently on ‘Smoochies’ than it did on her 2023 debut. Where ‘WEEDKILLER’ constructed an elaborate sci-fi universe, this album lives in what she calls “the human realm”. “As I get older, I want to express myself differently,” she says. “With ‘Smoochies’, I wanted it to feel like a diary entry.”

Her autobiographical approach comes with an existential grit. She describes feeling like purse sediment, “a mess of crumbs and gum in receipts and lip gloss that I’ve forgotten about”. It’s the perfect image for moments that are chaotic, overlooked, accidentally accumulated, but also precious. “I’m such a messy bitch,” she laughs. “I always have loose almonds at the bottom of my purse, or a fruit Gusher shoved into my wallet somehow. I’m an inconsistent person, and I make it very known in my music.”

That inconsistency extends to her creative process. Driven by limitless ideas, Ashnikko finds herself pulled in multiple aesthetic directions. “I can’t focus for that long, maybe it’s just me being extremely ADHD,” she says. “I am so interested in so many different aesthetics and worlds that I get really overwhelmed. I worry that I won’t get to read all of the books that I want to read in my lifetime.” Still, she’s learned to reframe this anxiety. “How great is it that there are so many things that I like?”

“With ‘Smoochies’, I wanted it to feel like a diary entry.”

The shift from the fantasy of ‘WEEDKILLER’ to the realism of ‘Smoochies’ also represents a return to why Ashnikko started making music in the first place. “With ‘WEEDKILLER’, I loved writing it, but I felt like I wanted to suffer for the art. With ‘Smoochies’, I’m paying homage to some of my favourites. It’s a little call back to the music that I made when I was younger - for joyful, fun experiences. Music is inherently fun, so I should have fun while making it.”

These include Gwen Stefani’s ‘Love.Angel.Music.Baby.’ alongside artists including Nicki Minaj, Britney Spears, and Paramore. Her moodboards pull from the anime Nana, Fruits Magazine, Josie and the Pussycats, Wes Anderson films, Alice in Wonderland, trash, and trinkets - a few examples to demonstrate a world that is equally maximalist and nostalgic. But beneath the candy-coated chaos is something more vulnerable.

On opener ‘Smoochie Girl’, she sings: “Oh no, how scary / I haven’t felt this exposed”. ‘Liquid’ follows with the admission “I wanna wear your skin / I need to be closer than this” - raw revelations from an artist who radiates armoured confidence. “I’m very sensual, I’m very sexy, I’m beautiful, but I can also be really ugly,” she says. “I’m a really good friend, a good sister, and I’m a good lover. But I’m also kind of an asshole sometimes.”

Balancing the complicated nuance of human experience is largely resolved on ‘Sticky Fingers’, where Ashnikko declares her refusal to accept anything less than the love she gives herself. “I have never known a love like my friends’ love,” she says. “The most intimate, caring relationships that I’ve ever had are platonic ones, and the one that I have with myself. Life is short, but it’s also long. And I would like to be spending time investing in myself, in my community and my art and nature, over investing in someone who’s loving me like a fraction of the amount that I love myself.”

This realisation has been freeing for Ashnikko. She’s bought a loom, she’s learning pottery, she’s spending time in nature. It’s also shifted how she approaches her career. For years, she operated in constant fight-or-flight mode, convinced that if she didn’t hustle relentlessly, her success would disappear. “I was immediately like, ‘Oh my god, I’m gonna lose it all, and go back to working in the club’. Like this was a fluke.” The industry, she notes, doesn’t reward relaxation - especially within pop. “There’s an obsession with exponential growth that never lets you simply celebrate what you’ve achieved.” Now, she’s reached a place of recognising that she’s built something solid. “For the first time in my career, I feel like I’m not gonna lose everything.”

“The most intimate, caring relationships that I’ve ever had are platonic ones, and the one that I have with myself.”

With ‘Smoochies’ due for release and a UK tour kicking off in February, what excites Ashnikko the most is the moment the music stops being solely hers. “Right now, the album is all just about me and how I felt writing it,” she says. “But the singles have taken on lives of their own. People can attach their own stories and let it soundtrack their own moments, and that’s so fucking cool.” She reminisces about her own formative songs, the ones that remind her of losing her virginity, first kisses, heartbreaks, sneaking out, and getting drunk at South Carolina’s Myrtle Beach. “I’ve adopted the songs that I love as my own. So when I go on stage, the first five seconds I have to choke back tears because I’m just so excited to see people excited to hear their favourite songs of mine and make them their own.”

The high regard that Ashnikko maintains for her audience shows in the live experience that she looks to provide. When she brings ‘Smoochies’ to the stage, she plans to approach it completely differently. “I’m investing a lot of my money into this show and trying to build something very theatrical,” she says. “I really want it to feel like a fever dream. I want people to leave the show thinking, ‘That was really strange’. Maybe like performance art meets concert.”

But first, she’s allowing herself to rest. After our conversation, she has plans to make textiles with her new loom, watch The Lord Of The Rings, and eat pumpkin in celebration of autumn. She has weekend plans to climb a mountain with her best friends. It’s all part of the same philosophy she’s been building toward - nurturing abundance within herself and making small changes that matter. “I’m having a great time, and I think it’s really important for me to remind myself that until someone comes along who really slots into that world and adds to the expansive love that I have for myself and my community, it’s just a waste of time.”

So move over, ‘Sticky Fingers’. Or, “get your sticky Cheeto dust hands off me,” as she puts it on the single. Because ‘Smoochies’ is all about the musician finding abundance in her own company, joy in the face of everything trying to shut her down, and power in expressing every messy, contradictory, beautiful part of being human.

‘Smoochies’ is out now via Parlophone.

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