The ground is shaking at TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens. The young crowd at the borough’s premiere velvet-curtained rock bar is here to see the electronic trio Kassie Krut open for Safe Mind, the new project from cult zillennial pop artist Cooper B. Handy, and the noise rattles our legs to the bone. Awash in red light, Kassie Krut organise themselves in a row. Eve Alpert, centre, wears a black Tool T-shirt layered with a tiny chain, speak-singing and dubbing Kassie Krut’s set of concrete beats and uncanny melodies through her mixer. Matt Anderegg, right, triggers the blown-out percussion. Left of Eve is her partner, Kasra Kurt, donning sunglasses as he uses a drum stick to hit a contact-mic’d metal cog, from a machine of unknown origin, and a three-stringed guitar prepared with gardening wire and laid flat on the table, sending the sounds through pedals for an atonal melee. Banging the tabled guitar is a self-aware and disarmingly funny gesture from musicians who, until last fall, were better known for their angular art-rock band Palm.
I leave convinced. The underground-rock-to-pop pipeline is a tale as old as time, but Kassie Krut’s transformation from DIY rock deconstructionists to industrial pop heads feels exciting and rare, a breath of fresh air in the form of a slashed, ecstatic sound that makes you want to tear it all down and start over. Their scorched statement-of-self single “Reckless,” from their upcoming Kassie Krut EP, shows just why: “If you ask me who I wanna be / I’mma spell it out so it’s plain to see,” Alpert sings, featherlight over a sputtering beat, “K-A-S-S-I-E K-R-U-T-T-T-T!” The song’s video finds the trio hitting metal cans and rocking at a friend’s practice space before going full French New Wave at The Met, taking notes on paintings like “Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist”; it is enviably cool. Kassie Krut are making the kind of music that I think a lot of artists want to make in 2024 — metallic post-punk art-pop that’s synthesized but human, heavy but in-flight, current and physical and alive.
A few days later I meet Kassie Krut at Alpert and Kurt’s spacious Ridgewood apartment, where they moved in January after eight years in Philadelphia. Anderegg followed in July; he lives in Greenpoint. The Ridgewood apartment, still a bit spare, is where they currently make music on a desktop just outside the living room. A copy of Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (Kurt’s current reading) rests on a coffee table, and elsewhere in the apartment I glimpse stacks of books including William Burroughs and Ottessa Mossfegh, and issues of n+1 and The Baffler. On the kitchen cassette player, they’ve been revisiting titles from the tape rack mounted to the wall — mostly friends and bands they’ve played with over the years, like Palberta, the Cradle, Sediment Club. In the living room, at the front of a small crate of records, is Nina Ryser’s recent Water Giants LP, for which Alpert, who is also a photographer, contributed album art.
At the kitchen table, Alpert sips ginger-chamomile tea and Kurt takes occasional vape hits – Anderegg sits between them – as the trio describes the process of evolving from heady indie rockers into a digitally-programmed pop trio. They listen carefully to one another, serious in the right ways but not too self-serious, laughing when their ideas knowingly toe the line. It was at the end of 2022 that they began meeting up, in Philly, to focus on Kassie Krut. The project had started with Kurt solo in 2019, but as he spent quarantine digging into the mechanics of digital music-making – “It was a lot of YouTube tutorials and reading forums” — the importance of continuing to work collectively became clearer. “I really believe in collaboration, not only in a political sense, but in a creative sense,” Kurt says. “I think the vast majority of people make more interesting work when they work together with others.”
“I don’t think it’s romantic to start a musical project with your partner — but I do think it’s kind of romantic to do it a second time.”
Kasra Kurt
Among those tools Kurt was investigating during the pandemic was the digital synthesizer Serum, which the band notes was the same software synth used by their late hero Sophie. Her steely, spartan early singles, released about a decade ago, gave Kassie Krut a sonic starting-point – a way to wrap their heads around new technology, and a vanguard sound they still find enthralling. “You get this textural, eviscerating sound design that is really forward thinking, but it’s also, at the core of it, beautiful music,” Anderegg says. “One thing with this project that we’ve talked about a lot is, things can get really visceral and harsh, but it should always be beautiful.”
Like Sophie, the trio’s first guiding principle was minimalism. “We really wanted an air of off-the-cuffness,” Alpert says. They collectively emphasise how “playfulness has been a goal,” that “things can be both abrasive and playful.” Their conversations about music tend to circle “how it makes you feel in your body,” Kurt says — “and your soul as well,” Anderegg adds with a tinge of sarcasm, and they all laugh. (It’s clear they also mean it.)
Alpert was born in Jackson Heights, Queens and moved to London at 13, which is when she and Kurt met as rock- and metal-loving high schoolers at the American School in London. They started going to gigs together, always in search of the next cool band to show each other, and soon enough, galvanised by the perennial high-school scripture of Sonic Youth and Pavement, were making music together, too. Now in their early 30s, they’ve been a couple since their teenage years. (The day before this story was published, Alpert posted on her Instagram story that the pair had gotten hitched: “Married my day one,” she wrote, with a picture of their shadows.) “There’s still no one I trust more than Eve, if she likes something or doesn’t like something that we’re working on,” Kurt says. “I think that comes from the long time we’ve worked together. I think most musicians fantasise about playing music with your partner in some way. I don’t think it’s romantic to start a musical project with your partner — but I do think it’s kind of romantic to do it a second time.”
They both moved to the Hudson Valley to attend Bard College, where Alpert studied photography and Kurt majored in history. It was at Bard that they formed Palm in 2009, and when that band toured with the kindred spirits in Athens avant-rock band Mothers, they met Anderegg, who ultimately produced the great final Palm album — in addition to playing with the frenetic R&B project Body Meat, the punk band Sweepers, and recording beguiling singer-songwriter tape experiments as Infinity Dance Complex. “More than a band, Kassie Krut feels like a group of songwriters and producers and we’re all involved with that,” Kurt says. “It was important to not feel like any of our roles were limited to a specific instrument.”
Our conversation ambles from early-aughts emo to UK garage and grime to industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Neubauten. Alpert describes other contemporary influences she has obsessed over for how they inspired her to “throw vocals on the tracks with a bit more looseness,” like Tirzah, Cooly G, Lolina and Dean Blunt. I tell her the casual, possibility-stoking spirit of these artists all reminds me of her most formative inspiration – Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth – and she agrees. When she saw Kim play at Central Park on a perfect June night this summer, “I was smiling the whole time. It just reminded me how influential she has been for me over the years.”
One highlight on the band‘s self-titled EP is the delightfully dubby curveball “United,” which channels the Jamaican sounds Alpert and Kurt absorbed on London streets as kids. A swell of guitar distortion jars against its soft sway; the song deviates from Kurt’s typically abstracted lyrics, he says, in “how directly it’s a love song”. On “Reckless,” the song’s band-name exposition is later followed by Alpert spelling out “K-I-S-S-I-N-G,” nursery-rhyme style. “There is something tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also somewhat earnest,” she says. Regarding the video, she adds, “I like that it gives the song a visual sense of humor because maybe it could be interpreted as more serious than we want it to be.”
Towards the end of our interview, I admit I originally misheard Alpert’s lyrics to “Reckless” as “Wanna be the best, so I gotta be me” — the last word is actually “mean” — and her bandmates laugh in agreement; they thought that was the lyric at first, too. Maybe I mistook it for a more sincere assertion of self-realisation because — despite the cool, menacing, future-pitched edges of the music — I hear Kassie Krut as a testament to the timelessly thrilling possibilities of ripping it up to start again, becoming ever truer to yourself, destroying to create. When Alpert sings “I wanna be fast and I wanna be free,” it’s a literal nod to Kassie Krut’s uninhibited writing process. “That’s been part of our ethos with the project,” she says. “Getting out of yourself a bit and not being so self-conscious, or, I don’t know, looser and lighter.”
“I would say it’s more aspirational than reflective of us,” Kurt adds with a smile, then pauses. “We’re mostly slow, but nice.” The trio erupts into laughter.
What keeps them attuned to newness? “Maybe it’s as simple as going hand-in-hand with the idea of playfulness,” Anderegg offers, “but within the realm of texture. I worry sometimes about overvaluing novelty in music. Trying to make something that sounds new can be shaky ground, actually, because futurism is something that’s always expiring, you know what I mean? But if these strange or futuristic-sounding textures can be rooted in emotionality and beauty and musicality — that’s where I become the most excited.”
Text: Jenn Pelly
Photography: Trevor Wisecup
