Interview Malice K: “I’m not an indie artist. I’m a fuckin’ rockstar”
Carving his path in the cracks between genre, NYC-based Malice K is rejecting so-called scenes and polished production in favour of strikingly visceral storytelling.
“When I came to New York, I started having this gravitational pull [towards] this white, upper middle class indie kinda thing. And that was a really existential change for me because I just thought: ‘This is super lame’. I’m not an indie artist. I’m a fuckin’ rockstar. I hated that.”
Much like the post-pandemic phenomenon of any guitar band within a 50-mile radius of Brixton being slapped with a ‘post-punk’ tag, the past few years’ supposed indie sleaze revival had gained something of a chokehold on the scene’s spiritual home of NYC – something that alternative polymath Malice K was none too happy about being dragged into. Alex Konschuh, as he’s otherwise known, is speaking to DIY the day after kicking off his European tour at London’s Sebright Arms (where, he tells us, one crowd member was proudly sporting homemade Malice K merch), and it’s not hard to understand why he found such a lack of nuance frustrating.
Both his previous projects – 2020’s ‘Harm or Heck’ and 2022’s ‘Clean Up On Aisle Heaven’ – and his upcoming third outing ‘AVANTI’ (touted as his debut proper for logistical reasons, but which Alex personally sees as LP3) are refreshingly liminal. The latter runs the gamut from tender acoustic cuts and ‘70s golden era pop (‘Songs For My Baby’, ‘Radio’) to moments of visceral, Nirvana-adjacent grunge and howling disarray (‘Halloween’, ‘You’re My Girl’). Why, then, does he think he suffered so much easy, sleazy pigeonholing? “I play guitar, so I’m automatically seen as ‘indie’,” he shrugs. “But I wasn’t playing shows for six months or something, because I wasn’t gonna get on the bill with any of those people. I just found so much of that scene to be super naive and oblivious to the actual world.”
“[Malice K] has enough reach that it can kind of belong to everything. Which makes it difficult, because then it can also just as easily not belong to anything.”
Instead, Alex views his Malice K output as embodying “more of a maverick kind of style”; having left a like-minded community of fellow creatives in LA (an artist collective dubbed Deathproof Inc.) to move to The Big Apple, he was soon forced to carve out a niche that was entirely his own. “When I was in association with something that was bigger than me, I was kinda being handed my audience, you know?” he explains. Now, he’s as comfortable playing an acoustic night as he is a trap show or a punk gig, but these chameleonic credentials come with an intrinsic element of loneliness, too. “[Malice K] has enough reach that it can kind of belong to everything,” Alex muses. “Which makes it difficult, because then it can also just as easily not belong to anything.”
Less jack of all trades and more master of one, through Malice K, Alex has found himself “being more transparent and not trying so hard to create this version of myself that I wanted to be”. As a self-confessed shy person, such sincerity doesn’t always come easily; his habit of leaking projects to “try to get gratification for something that isn’t finished” ultimately “dwindles [his] own self-confidence”, while starting afresh in New York as labels scrambled to sign him presented its own crisis of identity (“I’d only ever written music and made art, and now I was talking to lawyers. It was like, ‘I’m not living anymore’,” he affirms).
Nevertheless, Alex has channelled this tumult, both internal and external, into ‘AVANTI’ – an album that, unbeholden to the stylistic constraints of a particular sound or scene, sees Malice K seize upon something truly singular.
‘AVANTI’ is out on 23rd August via Jagjaguwar.
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