K.Flay kicked off her musical career with experimental rap mixtapes like Suburban Rap Queen in 2003 when she entered Stanford University. Since then, singer has dabbled in different styles, but retained a biting, rough-around-the-edges sound. She’s dropped such projects as I Stopped Caring in ’96 and Life as a Dog and her Grammy-nominated 2017 track “Blood In The Cut” is a raging strutter.
“I had this kind of peripatetic existence,” K.Flay says of her earlier music, much of it written right here in the Bay Area. “I didn’t live anywhere. I was on tour constantly. So, there was a real sense of displacement that I felt and I really was trying to reckon with in that period.”
But K.Flay’s latest album, Solutions, has a different, somehow quieter, feel. A new softness colors one of the album’s lead singles, “Sister.”
“Sister,” unsurprisingly, talks about siblings. K.Flay explains that she has a brother and a sister, though they aren’t related by blood. Her parents split up when she was around 5 or 6, and her stepfather — her two siblings’ biological father — helped raise her and later adopted her.