SLIPPING by Kai Bosch

Having just performed a sold-out London headline show, and with the news of his debut EP dropping this summer, 20-year-old London based musician/producer Kai Bosch today teases another track from his introductory offering. ‘Blood’, a deeply personal song cloaked in ethereal, innovative production and Kai’s wistful vocals, is the third single from his forthcoming EP ‘SLIPPING’, due for release on 5th August.

Speaking about the single, Kai explains “Blood explores trauma and mental health through the lens of a relationship and how it can affect the people around you. I wrote and produced it from my bedroom at the end of January 2021, at the time I was going through quite a tough time emotionally and I was really reflecting on how my emotions and mechanisms might affect the people I love. I wanted to embody emotional baggage as something quite visceral and gory, landing upon the line “Blood on everything I love.” Though the relationship in Blood was a purely fictional one at the time of writing, there have since been moments in my romantic life where the song manifested into reality - lyrics I had perhaps written before without much context suddenly held huge emotional weight.”

Also featured on the EP are the singles ‘Orbit’; a haunting love song written by Kai to his 17-year-old self, and his debut release ‘Be Right Back - a track that drew him comparisons to The XX and Jamie Woon. His previous releases have received nods of approval from Clash, The Line of Best Fit, NME, Gigwise, ENFNTS TERRIBLES, BBC Introducing and more.

Staged under the cover of darkness and imbued with a subtle yet high stakes sense of emotional drama, the music that Kai Bosch crafts makes a lot of sense if you look not at where he’s come from, but where he’s been. Having uprooted himself aged 17 from the sleepy town of Polzeath, Cornwall to the throbbing nightlife of Berlin before moving to London, his music is as indebted to the pursuit of sensation as its author. Nodding to the nocturnal sensibilities of James Blake, the gentle emotional surges of The XX and the crisp picture-painting of Lorde, Kai sets out to create music that sounds like how it feels.

If the narrative of the small town boy finding himself in the big city sounds like one taken from a coming of age film, then Kai’s early years serve only to amp up the redemptive story arc even further. It’s easy to forget given the positive recent leaps in queer representation in the media that, even half a decade ago, the public role models for a young gay man growing up in a “very Tory, very closed-minded” area were far more limited. “I came out when I was 14, I was the only gay kid at school and I didn’t quite know how to act,” he recalls. “At the time, the only film on Netflix that was gay was called ‘Gay Best Friend’ so you bet I became that. All of a sudden I changed my voice, I bleached my hair and started wearing iridescent silver jackets and horrendous foundation. The further and further I got into that, I really did have an identity crisis that took quite a long time to pull myself out of.”

During this time, however, Kai had started to discover artists such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde - people whose music embraced sadness and vulnerability, and who showed that there was beauty to be found in life’s messy grey areas. These were women who could transport you to a whole different universe, one far removed from the blinkered reality Kai was actually living in. “From then on, music really became the only thing that helped me cope and escape,” he says. “I think someone like Lana probably resonated with me because I wasn’t very happy at the time. I’d listen to her and get to be in my own world.”

Taking this increasingly important passion, teaching himself keyboard and starting to write in secret, it took a while for Kai to let anyone into the private musical safe space that he’d started to build. But by the time he reached his second year of college, it just became everything. He applied early to Goldsmiths, was accepted to start on a music course the following year and immediately left for Berlin.

Inspired more by the idea of articulating feeling than any particular genre, the sensory explosion of his new life quickly translated into ripe material. The duality of vulnerability and hedonism that runs through Kai’s forthcoming first EP, though written during a seven month period once he’d moved back to London, can all be traced to those formative Berlin months.

Following his recent performances at The Great Escape in Brighton and his sold-out headline London show at Servant Jazz Quarters on 28th June, Kai Bosch is excited to return to the stage for a headline EP release launch party, at London’s The Waiting Room on 4th August. Tickets are available from dice.fm.

Staged under the cover of darkness and imbued with a subtle yet high stakes sense of emotional drama, the music that 22-year-old Kai Bosch crafts makes a lot of sense if you look not at where he’s come from, but where he’s been.