Music is So Much More to KÁRYYN and Here’s Why

May 20, 2026
Culture & Music
Words:
Beanie Stolper
Photography:
Jenna Marsh

It’s always a good sign when Mary Poppins is quietly playing in the background of a Zoom call. A perfect entry point! After a short discussion on our shared love of said film, from there, the conversation opens into KÁRYYN’s ten track album: no traditional arc, no neat resolution, just ten self-contained worlds you can step in and out of as needed. For KÁRYYN, music isn’t just sound. It’s physics, philosophy, and the nervous system all at once. Quantum theory, neuroscience, Eastern thought, all collapsing into the same language. The visuals follow suit: suffragette echoes, historical femininity, systems thinking. A study of self that is never ending and carries on further when the listener enters the equation. Over to KÁRYYN.

Beanie Stolper: Hello KÁRYYN, let’s get right into it.
KÁRYYN: I’m ready for whatever you send my way. I was trying to put on ‘Blade Runner’ but it seems to not want to rewind. Do you want ‘Mary Poppins’? I feel like ‘Mary Poppins’ is also the vibe. I’m quite psychic, so the fact I picked it and haven’t had it in for a while, I’m like, I knew it. It’s just so beautiful, the costumes, the story, everything about it is amazing.

 

BS: It actually is my favourite film! 
K: That’s funny actually, we share that in common. And she will also need a rewind apparently, but let’s put it in.

 

BS: Firstly congratulations on the album. It feels like a really big, layered project. You’ve described your music as a “spiritual physics experiment rendered in sound.” What does music allow you to investigate that language can’t?
K: I think in this case the music and the words and the intentions all work together, especially on this song we’re talking about right now. ‘End To Knowing You’ is a great example of that, using terminology of space and physics to speak on universal themes of love, self-love, how you relate to people, how you treat yourself, how you treat other people, and how you navigate being alive.
The album is about the breakup of me and myself, or with my higher self really, and the ego. It’s about getting rid of, or unbecoming, everything that had become of me while I was trying to become someone. It’s that process of survival, all the things we build to get through life, and then sometimes you just need to let those things collapse and come back to yourself in the truest form. That’s what she’s doing on this album.
BS: You draw on neuroscience, quantum physics, and Eastern philosophy. How do all these different ways of looking at yourself shape your authorship as a singer?
K: I don’t see them as separate things at all. It’s very much a collapse phase, this moment where everything is breaking down, but also simultaneously becoming something new. That’s really the whole point for me. Physics, universal love language, this idea of pull. It’s all describing the same thing. Physics in the science world is trying to explain what reality is, what is real, what perception is. And then you have mindfulness, Buddhism, Vedic philosophies, Hinduism. All of these ancient systems of thinking about reality and to me they’re saying the same thing from different directions. When I started writing these songs, around sixteen years ago, I was deep in all of that. The songs were written by 2016 and then it was a long process of finding collaborators and shaping it. But I realised all these systems are actually pointing to the same truth. Even now, it feels almost like pop culture to understand that quantum physics and ancient philosophy are describing the same thing. So I’m collaborating with my past, present and future self constantly. Not as a cool idea, but because it’s the trust and what I experience. That’s why it doesn’t feel separate to me. It’s all the same language.

 

BS: The album ‘PHYSICS UNIVERSAL LOVE LANGUAGE (PULL)’ comes out May 29. What changes for you when it goes from being something very internal and private to something that’s out in the world? 
K: I’ve had this material for so long, so I’ve lived inside this world deeply for years. So when it starts coming out, I actually get to re-experience it in a new way. I listen and think, “oh, that’s really interesting,” or “that’s really good, I did a good job,” or I get surprised by it again. It’s like the songs are airplanes; you can hear the engine first, then it gets louder and louder, and then suddenly it’s here. I start to live the lessons of the songs again as they come out.
So even though I wrote them years ago, when they release I start experiencing those themes in real time again. I think also there’s a shift where it stops being mine in a private sense. It becomes something that other people complete. The album is not finished when I make it, it’s finished when people hear it. So it becomes a collaboration with whoever listens to it, and that’s when it really activates. I feel a kind of elation, because the character in the album becomes fully realised by the end. She’s done the work. She’s confronted herself. And then it’s just out there, doing what it needs to do.

 

BS: In terms of the architecture of the album, each track feels like its own contained narrative. Almost like parables. Do you have a set way you want people to listen to it?
K: I’m glad you picked up on that. Every song is very much its own thing. It’s not like “here’s how I feel,” it’s more like “this is what I lived, this is what I found out about it.” So each track is a conclusion of a process. Time is a collaborator on this album. The order is important in one sense. You always start with ‘Collapse Phase’ and end with ‘Forward’, it does begin with a beginning and end. In the middle, you can actually listen in different ways and it changes the journey completely. It almost becomes different versions of the same emotional arc depending on how you move through it. Depending on how you sequence it, the meaning shifts. It’s almost like different pathways through the same emotional architecture.

 

BS: So it becomes almost a different album depending on how you listen to it. Even something as simple as how you walk to a bus stop changes the journey. It’s the same idea. I found it really emotional, but also really fun in parts. It felt very sincere.
K: That’s really nice to hear. It is devotional. I don’t really care about being cool. I just want people to feel their potential and to feel things. Especially people who don’t feel like they fit into anything, or who don’t dress like everyone else, or think differently. It’s really for people who are unafraid to be a bit “cringe,” or unafraid to feel things fully. I want people to feel like they can be everything at once, opposite things at the same time. That’s kind of the point of it.

 

BS: Do constraints in the industry help or hinder you creatively?
K: When I’m actually making the music I’m completely free. I’m not thinking about business at all. I’m just thinking: what would I want to hear next? It’s very intuitive. Then you put it in a format and it gets put into a system, and if you want it to exist in the world, there are structures around that. And right now there isn’t really a straightforward way for artists to reach people, unless you have certain backing or infrastructure. That’s just the reality. But that’s also why it comes back to the music. It has to stand on its own. I crafted every lyric, everything has meaning. This is not music, this is a message. And it becomes a collaboration with the listener. That’s where it completes itself.

 

BS: Your visual world feels inseparable from the music. How do you think about fashion within your work?
K: It’s not costume, it’s very much part of the same world. I have a whole document around it. For this album, the imagery pulls from suffragette movements, late 1800s and early 1900s women’s history, 1930s Paris, and also something modern and athletic. It’s all different eras coming together into one figure of a very powerful woman. She’s grounded in her body, unashamed to be a woman, but also completely powerful. She’s not performing femininity, she owns it. And I think a lot about the history of clothing, even things like porcelain dolls and what they represented for girls; fragility, expectation, control. All of that is part of it. Everything is layered. Even the back of the album is structured like systems and data and player information. It all connects.

 

BS: When the album is released, do you think it will shift or change in meaning?
K: I think it will pull. That’s the best way I can describe it. It has its own centre of gravity. It will attract people who resonate with it and repel people who don’t. And that’s actually exactly what it’s meant to do. It’s coded with a certain intention, and then it just moves into the world and finds its place. 
BS: Are you coming to London?
K: Yes, end of May. I’ll be based between London and Berlin. I used to live in London for years, so it’s home. I love it. It feels very familiar to me.

 

BS: Well we are super excited to have you!
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