AloneKitty's Michelle K on Grief, Thurston Moore's Tunings, and the Song She Wrote to Her Father

Credit: Ryan Brough

The Toronto band's new album, wide awake, was made during the year Michelle K lost both of her parents. She talks about letting go of perfection and finally saying what she'd been carrying for years.

The last song on AloneKitty's new album is the only one Michelle K made alone. She recorded "Disappointed (For the Last Time)" at Harlow Sound with engineer Justin McWilliams, playing guitar and bass and singing herself. She calls it a wall of sound aimed at the ghost of a father who couldn't, or wouldn't, accept who she was. He isn't here to hear it, and neither is her mother. Michelle lost both of her parents while the Toronto band was making wide awake, which comes out November 6 on Mint 400 Records.

"As adults we still, in some quiet way, think of our parents as the people behind us if everything falls apart," she says. "Suddenly that backstop was gone."

That kind of loss could have pushed the band into overworking the record. It did the opposite. AloneKitty produced wide awake themselves with engineers Darren McGill and Michael Flynn, and they cut most of it in one or two takes. Bassist Michael Small and drummer Stefan Loebus asked to go again only when they felt they'd left something on the table. A lot of the songs took shape after Michelle fell hard for Thurston Moore's The Last Day and started writing in his alternate tunings. Those tunings ended up on more than half the album, including "She Thinks It's Alright" and the lead single, "I'm Wide Awake." Simon Scott of Slowdive, who has now mastered the band's last two records, didn't take long to decide which song should come first. "It's a banger," he told her.

Mint 400 founder Neil Sabatino jokingly calls the band "shoegaze classic." Michelle accepts the label but doesn't hold on to it tightly. She grew up on Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Low long before the genre's current revival, and what drew her in was that none of those bands sounded like each other.

Watch the video for "I'm Wide Awake" below. Over email, Michelle talked with Rolling Stone about why grief made her pay closer attention instead of shutting down, and how Moore's tunings broke her guitar habits. She also shared the family history that changed how she understands her father, and why the new shoegaze wave reminds her of everyone buying flannel in 1993.

You've described your parents as the backstop that disappeared. Grief usually gets written about as fog or numbness, but you called the record wide awake. What does awake mean to you here? Was that title there before you lost them, or did it come out of it?

I think grief has a strange way of waking you up. Not because it makes you happier or wiser overnight, but because it strips away the illusion that time is endless. Suddenly you're paying much closer attention to the life you're actually living. Hopefully. That's what wide awake came to mean for me.

Thurston Moore's tunings from The Last Day ended up shaping more than half the album. What did those tunings let you say that standard tuning wouldn't? Did living in them change how you sang or wrote melodies over the top?

More than anything, the tunings stopped me from playing by muscle memory. I had to listen again. That made the writing feel spontaneous because I wasn't reaching for the same ideas I'd always reached for. Suddenly all the familiar chord shapes I'd been relying on for years produced these strange, interesting voicings instead. I'd never seriously approached the guitar that way before.

"Disappointed (For the Last Time)" is the only song you made completely alone, and it's aimed at a father who can't answer back anymore. Why did that one have to be just you? And did the peace you found come from the song itself or from those long control-room conversations around it?

I think that song had to be just me because it's probably the most direct conversation I've ever had with my father, even though he isn't here to hear it. Do we ever really resolve our childhood issues? I'm not sure we do. I've long since come to terms with the fact that he was carrying a lifetime of trauma that began long before I was born. He grew up in what was then Poland, now part of Ukraine. During the Second World War his family was forcibly deported by the Soviets to labour camps in Siberia.

On the journey that eventually brought his family to the UK, he lost his father, his sister and countless others. The stories my grandmother told were almost impossible to imagine. It doesn't change how he treated me, but it does provide context and maybe a space to accept that he did the best he could given what he had survived. He never talked about that trauma. I think the peace came from finally saying something I'd carried for years, and from doing it in a room where there was no judgment. Justin and I spent hours talking about music, art and life between takes. By the end, the song didn't feel like an argument anymore. It felt like a kind of acceptance.

You've said Michael and Stefan kept pushing for more takes even when you might have moved on. Can you name a moment on the record where one of them heard something you didn't, or a rough edge you kept that a more careful band would have fixed?

I honestly can't point to one specific moment because we were moving so quickly. We tracked most of the record in one or two takes, so there wasn't a lot of sitting around analysing every little thing. What I do remember is the attitude everyone brought into the room. Stefan was usually the first person to say, "Let's do that one again," if he felt he'd left something on the table. [Michael] was the same way.

Nobody was trying to protect their ego or convince anyone a take was "good enough." If someone thought they could do better, we simply played it again. Ironically, I think that's why the record feels spontaneous. Once everyone believed a performance captured the song, we moved on.

Even my own overdubs were done that way. Very little second-guessing. It really is a record that belongs to those few days in the studio.

Shoegaze is in its biggest moment since the '90s, and a lot of people found it through TikTok instead of through Low and Slowdive. You talked about records that didn't try to pass a purity test. Who's giving the purity test now, and does this new wave feel like your scene or something running next to it?

It's genuinely exciting to see younger people discovering bands like Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Ride, even if they found them through TikTok instead of a record shop. Music finding new listeners is always a good thing.

Where I sometimes struggle is when a genre starts to feel like it has a rulebook. The records that made me fall in love with shoegaze never sounded like they were trying to be "shoegaze." They were experimental. They were taking risks. Sonic Youth didn't sound like Slowdive. Slowdive didn't sound like My Bloody Valentine. They were all following their own instincts.

Every time a scene becomes popular, there's a temptation — for artists, labels and audiences — to define what belongs and what doesn't. We saw it with grunge in the '90s. Suddenly everyone owned a flannel shirt and every label wanted the next Nirvana.

I don't really want to participate in that. I just want to hear artists making records that couldn't have been made by anyone else. There are bands doing exactly that. One local band I really admire is No Beauty from Hamilton. Every time I see them, they're completely committed to their own thing. That's far more interesting to me than whether someone checks the right genre boxes.