King Princess Details

Is there a faster way to shoot to musical stardom in the early 21st century than to have Harry Styles tweet a cryptic reference to your debut single, “1950”? Never mind that you’re an almost unknown 19-year-old Brooklynite referencing a Patricia Highsmith novel from the 1950s in a quirky homage to queer history. The Directioners will seek you out, and they will make you a star.

It’s ironic that this is the ostensible origin story for King Princess, the appropriately gender-playful moniker of Mikaela Straus, whose startlingly innovative music could not be further from the engineered appeal of One Direction. Her 2018 debut EP, Make My Bed, is a tight collection of meticulously crafted pop gems, with Straus essentially writing, producing, and playing every instrument herself. The EP so impressed the producer Mark Ronson that he decided to make it the very first release on his new label, Zelig Records. “It was like a gut punch,” says Ronson of hearing Straus for the first time. “It was like reading every Ramona Quimby book. It’s the closest I’ll come to understanding being a teenage girl who doesn’t feel like she fits in.” Fiona Apple later joined forces with Straus on a new version of the ’90s star’s “I Know.” “We developed this crazy friendship. I feel so blessed to have her as somebody to ask questions,” Straus says by phone from her girlfriend’s house in Los Angeles. It’s early afternoon, but they’ve just woken up. Straus has been playing a lot of festivals lately, and it takes a toll. When asked about her on-the-road self-care regimen, she laughs: “Like a layer of pasta and then, like, a layer of La Mer and then just, like, tears.”

Straus wants her upcoming album, Cheap Queen, out this fall, to sound mature—“I feel like I’ve grown so much”—with a wide-ranging sonic palette. It’s a fitting aspiration, given that eclecticism was part of Straus’s earliest musical education; she played guitar, bass, keys, and drums in her childhood home in Williamsburg, where her father had a home studio. “I have my dad in my head saying, ‘Well, all these songs sound the same.’ I always think about that.” The tracks on Cheap Queen do vary— from the woozy R&B synths of “Better” to the bite-size Muzak-esque ditty “Useless Phrases.” The distinct sound of each recording is in part due to her collaborators—the Dap-Kings, Tobias Jesso Jr., and Father John Misty—but it’s also just a natural expression of Straus’s unapologetically genderqueer identity. “I write songs about girls. That’s my shtick,” she says, laughing. “I’m going to keep dating girls and getting my heart broken, so there’s going to be many more songs.”