King Princess is ready to take the next step with fans: getting matching tattoos.
On Sept. 13, one day after the release of her latest music manifesto, Girl Violence, the New York-based artist, aka KP aka Mikaela Straus, is hosting a global flash event in partnership with select women- and LGBTQ-led tattoo shops in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Australia (see the full list here).
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For one day only, fans will be able to select designs that permanently memorialize the album’s visual realm, including several featuring the voluptuous Cherry icon that has become the antagonist of the whole project. The cartoonish villain was first spotted in the video for the slinky lead single, “RIP KP,” in which Straus is a willing hostage in a lesbian strip club fever dream, and has been stalking her ever since.
“If you’re not the type of fan to get my whole face anatomically tattooed, there are other options,” Straus joked during a recent conversation, sharing details of the “incredible” flash sheets that were created. Fans who get inked will also be entered into raffles for signed merch. “There are Cherry-themed ones. Pussy-themed ones. I really want to see someone get the CUNT News in the CNN font,” she added, referencing a recent Instagram video where Lisa Rinna reads faux headlines about the beef between Straus and Cherry. (The musician is a huge fan of reality TV.) “I’m probably going to get one,” Straus affirmed, set on an image of Cherry strutting with a pair of long legs.
The idea for the unique album launch came from Chris Robbins, the “heavily tatted” head of KP’s record label section1/Partisan. Straus was immediately drawn to the pitch. “My fan base is obviously a lot of young queer people. And tattoos are a huge part of how we decorate ourselves,” she shared, a few pieces of her ink sticking out from beneath her T-shirt as she talks. “If you walk around Brooklyn, everyone’s covered.”
It’s an early morning and Straus, also wearing a ball cap pulled tight over a shaggy wolf cut, is sitting in her backyard. She’s just come back after racing to take out the recycling (“You know how serious they are in New York about the recycling!” she quipped) and is about to take her first sips of coffee as the conversation turns to her own growing collection of body art.
“I fucking love my tattoos. They’ve all been kind of … sentimental,” she shared, adding, “I’m not like the get drunk and get a tattoo type of chick. I have to plan it out and it becomes something that’s ceremonial. Every time there’s a new chapter in my life, I get a tattoo. Or when something good happens or something really bad happens, and I feel like I’ve learned from it, I get a tattoo.”
Straus’ latest chapter was not immune to the phenomenon. She recently moved back to her native New York after seven years in L.A., where she not only explored music (initially signing to Zelig Records, run by Mark Ronson, who helped launch her career in 2018 with the uber hit “1950”) but also acting. Straus recently made her debut as Tina in the second season of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers and is soon to be seen in the Hugh Jackman/Kate Hudson film Song Sung Blue, coming later this year. Naturally, a return to the place of her roots manifested in Straus’ latest art pick: a majestic blue heron on her bicep, joining a nearby Canadian goose on her arm.
“I’ve really come into my love of birds. And I wanted to continue the birds of the Adirondacks,” Strauss shared, explaining that upstate New York is a place where she spent a lot of time as a child roaming around her grandparents’ lake house. “I feel like the things that I connect to the most tend to be the things that I did or were the places I went as a kid. I guess I have attachment issues,” she said, laughing. “But that house, and nature, it reminds me of my grandparents. It reminds me of my childhood. It reminds me of the beauty of this world that I feel like I’m so rarely face-to-face with these days.”
It’s that lack and wanting of a simpler, kinder world—both personally and culturally—that inspired the more serious tones on Girl Violence. The 13 tracks are collectively described in press materials as “the sound of Mikaela Straus picking up the pieces of a world left shattered.”
“Violence has been deemed this masculine concept. And I think oftentimes basic violence is masculine: fighting physically, war, weaponry … all these things that have been basically appropriated by men and claimed by men,” Straus explained “Whereas this emotional warfare is what I’m more interested in. That which I have been both subject to and perpetrator of. I think that I just got really intrigued by putting a name to this thing that I’ve really always written about. … And to me it felt especially relevant right now, both in the world where we’re so used to masculine violence dominating everything, but when the reality is women’s warfare is there too … like even look at the fucking election. … Voting against your self-interest is girl violence.”
As a proud queer artist, Straus has taken the mantle seriously in these precarious times, albeit with her own unique touch of spreading joy as much as possible, always remembering when she was a lonely gay kid that just wanted to laugh. “If I can continue to put my head down and write about things that relate to our community, then that’s what I was put on this planet to do, you know?” she posited. (As part of the tattoo event, Straus, along with the partnering tattoo shops and her record label, will also make donations to local charities that support LGBTQ+ communities.)
“Yes, my perspective and my lens is really relevant right now,” she continued, “but the reality is that queer people have never been safe in this country. We have never been respected to our fullest. We are the proprietors of all art. If you get rid of gay people, you don’t have art. … We are the makers of shit. We are the stylists. We are the wardrobe people. We are the fucking hair people, we’re the makeup people, we’re the singers, we’re the dancers. You don’t get art without us. So I’m proud that I’m a part of a community that has such a rich tapestry and history of being the people who make things when the world gets dark.”
For those who don’t support the community or wish them ill, Straus still hopes they find their hands on a copy of Girl Violence and “they’re fucking terrified of this record. I hope they have no idea what they’re listening to and they’re terrified … and horny,” she joked. “Hunting Wives-style.”
The album was recorded at Mission Sound, the Brooklyn studio owned by her father, recording engineer Oliver H. Straus Jr. where Arctic Monkeys, Taking Back Sunday, Pink, Sia, War on Drugs, All-American Rejects, and many others have logged sessions. As a kid, Straus found it to be an incredible “playground” for her budding interests, evidenced by the many memories she’s able to rattle off.
“Oh my god there’s so many: Fist-bumping Missy Elliott. Watching Norah Jones and Cyndi Lauper record a Christmas album. Dolores from the Cranberries singing background vocals with incredible studio vocalists, teaching me how to layer and harmonize and build,” Straus recalled. But beyond the totem pole moments, she said, “Those that I really remember and resonate with most were being around studio musicians. They are really the unsung heroes of an era that I hope isn’t lost in music, where you call on people who are experts in their craft to come and do what they do. I spent a lot of time with those people … and I was obsessed.”
Straus leaned into that intimate working process with Jake Portrait (Lil Yachty, Alex G, Unknown Mortal Orchestra) and Aire Atlantica (behind SZA’s “Low”) for the broad range of sounds on Girl Violence. In addition to the sultry first single, “RIP KP,” which Straus equated to, “that state of being so enamored by someone and so in love that you’ll do anything they say, you’ll want anything they want, you’ll bend it over wherever,” there’s also the vengeful breakup pop of “Cry Cry Cry” and the layered doo wop-esque tribute to “Girls.”
Straus loves hard. Not that she can help it; it’s a passed down trait in her bloodline. Her great-great-grandparents were Ida and Isidor Straus, who famously died on the Titanic. As the story goes, the well-to-do couple were given spots on a lifeboat but Isidor (former congressman and co-owner of Macy’s) refused as there were still other women and children aboard he thought should take precedence. Ida chose to stay with her husband where they ultimately met their fate; they were depicted in James Cameron’s movie as the elderly couple who die together in bed. “I do oftentimes think about that. I must have gotten this obsession with being in love and romance somewhere,” said Straus.
She doesn’t know much about that part of her family history. “The Straus side of my family was so disjointed to be quite honest … There’s no, like, family reunion,” she joked. “So all the history I know is via the internet. But I do find it very major that they were so extra that they had to die together.”
When she shot Nine Perfect Strangers in Austria, Straus wasn’t far from Bavaria, where her distant family emigrated from—nor from the setting of another famous movie: The Sound of Music. The Hulu series had scenes in the same Salzburg estate. “The vibes in Austria are spooky,” she said. “The room that we were shooting in [for this season’s crazy waltz scene] had, like, frescoes on the ceiling. It was so ornate and stunning. … It felt ancient and important.”
It’s one of the scrapbook moments Straus took away from her first time on a set, saying the new form of expression helped her music, too. “Acting has really allowed me to be less precious about writing. Writing lyrics can be an extremely self-criticizing act of ridiculing yourself for the words you choose. And I don’t want to be that person. I would much prefer to trust myself, and acting has really allowed me to do that,” she said. “It’s also allowed me to be less precious about trying things and seeing if they work.”
Working alongside veterans like Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, and Christine Baranski (with whom Straus recently made headlines after a photo of them holding hands went wild on social media) was also a gift. “I got to be a student to all these incredible actors. I got to be around people who are so much better than me. And that is the coolest shit. I always want to be the worst person in the room. You can’t really learn from being the best,” she theorized. “These people took me in and were so kind and patient but also really sure of me. To be new at something and have people not be worried about you, their confidence in me was a major gift.”
As our conversation starts to wind down, a bird swoops down in Straus’ yard as one final grand gesture. After greeting it in a childlike voice, the multi-talent shared, “I think I’m going to keep birding,” already thinking about her next tattoo and the next chapter that will come with it.
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