Starly Kind dreams a new world with their new single, Demon Dreams

“Demon Dreams,” the new single from Starly Kind, is their first song–a piece they wrote just after moving to Sao Paolo, self produced and self-producing, the seed of a dream. The chronology of songwriting is often important only incidentally, a piece of trivia when thinking about a body of work which has no doubt been arranged and rearranged in the mind of the artist working on it, reordered and returned to countless times, relearned and replayed live, re-recorded and reworked again. It’s precisely through this constant return that songs resist temporality, existing at once as a set of notes, as words on a page, as waveforms encoded into files and saved to a drive, and as a tune, half-remembered, that you might hum to yourself as you go about your day.

Still, this recording, “Demon Dreams,” bears an importance as a kind of proof-of-concept for Starly Kind’s emerging project, first to themselves, and then to the world. When you have been somewhere once, you know you can find your way there again. The track begins with bright guitar, shimmering with a haze of fuzzy overdrive, and cascading vocal harmonies which soon find themselves also overdriven, building to a crescendo of crunchy intensity:

I will never be silent again

Floods can dry me

And salt in my wounds

But I’m made of blaze

And am making home here

Demon Dreams sets the tone for more than just Starly’s musical project–it’s interlinked with the larger project of identity, one of rejecting cultural impositions, reworking expectations, and building a new life in a new place with the pieces one finds useful.

I can help myself

But it takes a world

To be seen inside

And I don’t trust the dead-eyed

To call me xe

They

Elu

I call myself

And if you flinch

I won’t look your way again

A self, like a song, is composed, identifiable as a totality only in the aggregate, and located ultimately somewhere in between the artist and the world. Both are performances which ask only that we as the audience come ready to receive them. In this second verse, Starly wrestles with what is in many ways the crux of all performance: the trust a performer must have in their audience. They list their nonbinary pronouns in English and Portuguese “xe, they, elu,” inviting us into a compact of solidarity, but with the confidence to walk away if we don’t hold up our end of the bargain.

“I’m safer in this hell gate/but thanks for stopping by” Starly laughs as the track comes to a close, comfortable with or without us there on the other side of the dream.

Starly is on tour now in the PNW! See below for tour dates: