In September 2024, I was asked by the recording artist Okay Kaya to write the biography for her new album, Oh My God –– That’s So Me, which now appears across her social media. Below is the full text.

When Okay Kaya arrived on the scene in 2018, she came in two: Both was the name of her debut, and the signal for all that came after. She appeared in mirror image on its cover; sang ‘Emulate me / I’ll emulate you.’ She went on, in 2020, to release two albums in the same year; in the first she sang of symbiosis, in the second of separation. The next year, she pressed her face to a snowglobe containing her face on the cover of an album she called The Incompatible Okay Kaya, an album in which she covers songs of her own. ‘I could be anyone,’ she sang on Both’s ‘Can U Not.’

And yet, on her newest album, the essentials hold: the playfulness borne of precision, the light touch over heavy matters. At both the peak and trough of the sound wave, Kaya has found a new ease: ‘My Berenice’ and ‘Help, I’ve Been Put Into Context!’ find her stripped-back, almost serene; on ‘Spacegirl,’ she’s further out than she’s been before. And in the space between, she’s found a meeting point: whether pulsing or plaintiff, the songs in this latest release are at once melodic and meditative. On Sap she played conductor; this time, Okay Kaya has everything she needs: gentle strings and a hovering bass set the scene, and her voice, her vessel, is centre-stage. 

This album finds Kaya declaring, leaving statements without qualification; here, she’s not interrupting herself: she leaves her desires fully felt, her emotions experienced entirely (‘I wanted nothing more’). She lets herself fall back on comforting notions (‘One must imagine the rock happy’) and she’s just as at home in the minutiae (‘I swear I’ll pay attention / not just pleasure or pain.’). In the two years since Sap –– indeed, in the 6 years since Both –– Okay Kaya has travelled a great distance; it’s taken her back to herself. To fake it till she feels okay is something she just can’t do anymore: ‘I’ll take the sensations, just let me back into my body again,’ she sings in the triumphant march in, ‘The Wannabe.’ It is as if before recording the album’s final song, ‘The Art of Poetry,’ Kaya played what she had back and landed herself in the world of refrain, in a moment of recognition so overwhelming, so soothing, it needed repeating: ‘Oh My God — That’s So Me.’