Maintaining the rage: The reckoning of Kita Alexander
Kita Alexander channels some of her strongest emotions into her latest album, RAGE, ahead of a national tour this September.
Kita Alexander is sitting cross-legged on the floor of her Byron Bay home, preparing for another Zoom call. It’s been a busy week for the singer-songwriter from Brisbane as she releases her sophomore album, RAGE. The record had originally been progressing under the working title Miss Australia, but somewhere along the way Alexander felt something shifting beneath the surface and RAGE was born.
While her music has earned hundreds of millions of streams, ARIA nominations and support slots with some of the biggest names in pop, including Dua Lipa, RAGE finds Alexander confronting something she had spent much of her life avoiding – anger.
“I came to realise within myself that I’d been avoiding the feeling of anger and rage,” she says. “A friend pointed it out to me and I was like, ‘Whoa, I really do do that. I avoid ever going to that emotion’.”
The album is both a reckoning and a release. Recorded with producer Chris Collins at his Major Label Records studio in the Byron Bay hinterland, RAGE strips away much of the polish associated with contemporary pop in favour of organic instrumentation, live performances and emotional honesty. The setting itself became part of the record.
“It’s this amazing studio up in the hills overlooking Australian bushland,” she says. “It’s the best studio in terms of vibes. A lot of studios you’re boxed in, but I love his studio because you’re overlooking mountains and trees. It’s amazing.”
The seeds of RAGE were planted more than two years ago when Alexander wrote Press Pause and I Don’t Want to Go Home. But the song that ultimately unlocked the album was Avoidance, written with long-time collaborator Shungudzo Kuyimba.
“I said, ‘Oh, I don’t like therapy. I’d rather just park it there. I’m really good at just parking things and not looking at them’. She said, ‘Let’s write a song about that’. When we were playing it back, I had my hands over my eyes like, ‘Oh my God, what is up with me? What am I avoiding? Why did I write this song?'”
Alexander believes songs often reveal truths before she consciously understands them.
“I do believe for me (that) sometimes songs prematurely predict my future in a weird way,” she says. “What comes out of me knows it needs to come out before I’m even aware of it consciously.”
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As more songs emerged, a larger theme began to reveal itself. Tracks such as The Good House explored the tension between appearance and reality.
“It’s this feeling of presenting one way, but really your internal world is falling apart,” she says.
As Alexander attempted to explain the album to her record company, she found herself continually returning to the same ideas.
“I’m presenting one way but not feeling that way on the inside. I don’t want to look through the world through rose-coloured glasses. I want to be real with myself. I want to take them off and confront what’s underneath.”
Ironically, the title track was one of the final songs written.
“I literally called the label and I was like, ‘I want to change. I want to pivot the record title’. Everyone loved it. Everyone thought it made total sense.”
Much of the album’s emotional power comes from Alexander’s willingness to discuss feelings that women are often encouraged to suppress.
“I think women in this world don’t get to just experience anger, because it’s not a pretty emotion. We’re not supposed to be seen with it on camera, or there has to be a big reason for it.”
For Alexander, anger doesn’t necessarily require an explanation.
“Sometimes I can just wake up angry. Sometimes it’s just an emotion.”
She traces some of those feelings back to childhood.
“My dad would always say, ‘You would never smile’. He has this digital photo frame and I’m at the beach frowning, I’m at Disneyland frowning.”
Even now, she says, her father notices when she doesn’t smile in photographs.
“I remember one Christmas recently I was just doing a very soft smile and he was like, ‘You okay? What’s wrong?'” She laughs at the irony.
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“My daughter … was born frowning and we took so many photos of that frown. Her frowning is one of our favourite things ever.”
Visually and sonically, RAGE reflects this process of stripping away artifice.
“I had the imagery in my head, I had the colours in my head, I had the sounds in my head before the themes, necessarily.”
Alexander deliberately avoided synthetic textures.
“I wanted all the instrumentation to be organic. I didn’t want computer sounds. I wanted to be more raw with my vocal.”
Even her clothing became part of the concept.
“We wanted what I’m wearing in the album to coincide with how I am day to day, which is a singlet and jeans. Very stripped back, very me, very real. I’m stripping everything back, taking away all the layers that I don’t always identify with, anyway, and then what’s underneath is this simmering rage.”
The album arrives after Alexander spent much of the past year touring, including opening for Dua Lipa on the singer’s Australian tour. The experience reignited ambitions she admits had become dormant.
“It made me really want that for myself,” she says.
Standing before thousands of people every night brought back dreams she had spoken about early in her career.
“When I was signing record deals and having meetings with record companies, I said to all of them, ‘I want to be in arenas’.”
Motherhood and life had altered her trajectory.
“I suppose taking time away, being a mum, only having one foot in and one foot out of music, I think I forgot that part of my dream. I got off stage on the Dua tour and I was like, ‘Yep, I want that for me’.”
As for the anger that inspired the album, Alexander isn’t interested in letting it go.
“I’m really in the middle of it. I’m wholeheartedly accepting it. I don’t want to let it go. I want to hold on to it in a sense of allowing it to be in my life.”
Meditation has become an important tool.
“Meditation for me is a really big part – to come back to my breath, calm myself down and obviously accept the rage, accept the anger, but then on the other side let it move through and not let it stagnate and fester.”
For an artist who spent years avoiding those feelings, RAGE represents something more than a collection of songs. It is a reckoning with emotion, identity and self-acceptance.
RAGE is out now. Kita Alexander tours nationally in September, playing The Princess Theatre, Brisbane, on September 19, and The Gov, Adelaide, on September 24.
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