STARLY KIND

In that liminal space between dreams and nightmares resides Starly Kind. There, the project’s mastermind, Starly Lou Riggs, presides over a hellscape infested with demonic symbolism, esoteric childhood lore, intrepid pan-genre explorations, stuffed animals, chains, spikes, and white lace. Within this self-stylized perdition, they explore the intricacies of gender in relation to societal pressures, feeling monstrous in the wake of structured gender roles and expectations.  “When you realize you’re queer later in life, you can fall back into childhood because you lost a lot of time feeling like you didn’t fit in,” says the São Paulo-based artist. “Starly Kind is an alter ego, collecting all the little pieces of my childhood, uplifting queer and fem people, and dismantling binaries. I’m non-binary in everything—you can’t put me in a box.”

Starly Kind is the culmination of Riggs as a multi-hyphenate creative: a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, journalist, visual artist, among other things. To date, Starly Kind has released a pair of singles and a live EP, and performed throughout Brazil and Portland, Oregon where they lived previously, then playing in the doom-y griefgaze band, Death Parade.  Starly Kind invites comparisons to King Woman, Chelsea Wolfe, Nuvolascura, and yeule. Riggs’s songs are adventurous collage art, flirting with but never committing to emo, punk, doom, screamo, shoegaze, new glitch, jazz, Brazilian music, and haunting David Lynch-esque cinematic musicality. These tracks are thrilling sojourns through challenging odd time signatures, startling dynamic shifts, and dense textural passages featuring clarinet, flute, and distressed samples. They are frightening, empowering, and oddly comforting.  Riggs brings Starly Kind to life with a raw emotional live show that exudes an extra-terrestrial-creature-from-the-stars pageantry, occult ceremoniousness, and scrubbed-raw purgation.

All this to say, the Starly Riggs story doesn’t begin with Riggs being beamed to earth from some darkly exotic netherworld. They moved around as a child. Starly was born in Roswell, New Mexico (referenced in the single, “Starly Kind”), spent their younger years in Ohio as a non-religious family living amongst an Evangelical church-going community, before their family settled in Ukiah, California. Riggs was a shy, sensitive, and eager-to- please child that struggled to suppress outsider feelings that they would come to understand in high school as queerness. Their catharsis was in pounding the keys on the family piano as a punk rock purge of shameful feelings. It was a brash expression in sharp contrast to their family’s lineage of musical training—their mom sang classical and their grandmother was an opera singer. Music remained a solitary pursuit in the face of the local music scene’s toxic machismo, and college wasn’t much better. Riggs discovered this playing bass in their first band. “After getting offstage someone said to me, ‘you should smile more.’ No one else in the band was smiling! Why me?” they recall. 

In 2014, Riggs moved to Portland where they joined Death Parade, starting out on keys, but later switching to guitar, having never played the instrument live. “I felt like Laura [Hopkins, founding member of Death Parade] and I supported each other in beautiful ways. We both understood what it was like to not be taken seriously as fem people in this music industry,” Riggs says. Ten years later, Riggs moved to Brazil to be closer to their partner. There, they found a nurturing music community. Brazil has made an indelible imprint on Riggs: the person, and Starly Kind, the tormented musical alien. Their upcoming LP will showcase some of this with its Brazilian music and jazz influences. “I felt very judged in the US, like I always had to prove myself,” Riggs says. “These days I feel this power that I haven’t felt before. I’m fearless.” - Lorne Behrman

Band Website

Booking/Contact

starlykind@gmail.com