James K

James K is a New York-born vocalist, producer, and multidisciplinary artist whose ethereal, genre-defying sound has quietly shaped the trajectory of underground music for over a decade.

With her third, acclaimed album Friend released this year, she returns to her creative core weaving melody, emotion, and technical mastery into a hypnotic body of work that feels at once intimate and expansive. Through her voice and vision, james K continues to redefine what experimental pop can feel like. Both james K’s polysemantic lyrics and lush production provide the listener an opportunity to experience for oneself the song as a journey and to arrive at their own conclusions: liberated from the urgency of knowing, but ushered by the need to find out. K paints a narrative with an ever-broadening host of references, nestling us inside of Friend’s familiarity: timeless and indefinable. james K’s work has garnered praise from outlets such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Alt Press, Resident Advisor, and The FADER, among others, and K was also spotlighted as BBC Radio 6’s Breaking Artist in 2025.

K has consistently beta-launched sounds and perspectives that have rippled across many mediums for years, defining a way that is both singular in vision and marked by collaboration and shared dreaming. To this day, her transmutative career has led K to amass a bouquet of collaborations with artists like Oli XL, Yves Tumor, and Drew McDowall (Coil). K has been a resident on NTS, with her show, ‘Trip Lick,’ since 2019, and she has provided mixes for series such as Dekmantel, Crack and Fact.

Her breathy, lilting vocals have floated across some of the past year’s best music. Expanding and ethereal, they make you feel like the call is coming from inside the house. You can trace touch points across her lengthy catalogue, spanning from the foundational urgency of 2013’s debut Rum EP, to the prismatic elasticity of PET (She Rocks!/Dial), to the strange-faced, visceral and, at times, sepulchral intoxication of Random Girl (Incienso), to the universal ecstasy of trip-hop lullaby ‘Scorpio’ (AD 93).

Known for her polychromatic hypersensitivity, K’s hauntological dream pop is making ‘music that slows the anxious heart while holding a mirror to the deep-rooted angst we prefer to leave unspoken. K’s willingness to be vulnerable - to delve into/feel her way through rangelessness is her signature: exploring the contours of all genres, and laying the framework for new conversations between artists.