It’s close to one in the morning, and Kathy Yaeji Lee is about to perform inside of a squat, unmarked building in Brooklyn. In the daytime, the surrounding industrial area is filled with the loud whir of trucks loading and unloading, but now there’s only the indelible sound of bass that follows the borough’s dance scene wherever it chooses to call home for the night. Past the front door, an unctuous, floral odor wafts in the air. Nestled by the entrance is a man selling Japanese curry. Meanwhile, a projector lights up a wall with video of someone spooning curry stew onto a plate, and throngs of smiling people clutching beers and bowls of food fill the dancefloor. The festive energy flowing through the room feels as much like a buzzing dinner party as a sweaty rave. This vibe is by design.
While living in New York over the last couple of years, Yaeji has cultivated a family of friends at events just like this one. It started when she decided to make use of some Japanese curry cubes that her mom had sent her, and invited a few of her club-going pals to dinner. This intimate meet-up eventually became a weekly ritual called “Curry in No Hurry,” where she served her favorite dish, and her guests, many of them fellow musicians, played her their new music. “There’s something about the sense of communion that comes with sharing food out of one pot that makes sense to me,” she says.
Yaeji has since partnered with a local Korean restaurant to serve curry at her shows, trying to recreate the convivial feeling of those personal gatherings. Amid this atmosphere, the nondescript Brooklyn locale becomes a little friendlier. When Yaeji picks up the mic for the first time, she flashes a swaggering stage presence. Her voice is defiant even though she often sings in a whisper; her tone is melodic and angular. Her flow is like that of a rapper, in the way she links together rhymes and keeps rhythm, but there’s also an energy lurking beneath her delivery that echoes classic, soaring house singers.
Lyrically, though, the 24-year-old’s musings are not your typical party-staring fare. From her 2016 debut release through to her forthcoming EP2, Yaeji’s songwriting is funny and deeply introspective, tackling topics including Korean identity, anxiety, therapy, and the tyranny of makeup and skincare culture in a mix of Korean and English. It can be heady to look at her lyric sheets, but her sound, a unique mashup of house, trap, and rap, is interested in sheer joy. This is most clear in songs like “Last Breath,” a forceful, high-energy club track about how surreal beauty regimens can be. In the song’s video, Yaeji calmly dabs foundation on her face as a barrage of kick drums explode around her.
Yaeji was born in Flushing, Queens and lived in New York with her parents till she was 5. They moved around a lot, first to Long Island, then to Atlanta. As she entered third grade, fearing their daughter was becoming too Americanized, Yaeji’s family moved back to South Korea; her father, who once played in heavy metal bands, was particularly wary of American pop music, going as far as to censor the Pussycat Dolls from his young daughter. Eventually, Yaeji made it back to the States when she enrolled in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University to study painting and conceptual art. She also got involved in college radio, where she was exposed to electronic music for the first time and picked up an interest in DJing and producing.
In NYC after school, she still wasn’t sure if she wanted to enter the art world or devote herself to music. By day she hustled as an artist assistant and later as a graphic designer; after work, she would upload songs to SoundCloud and head out to shows every night, taking in the city’s next generation of underground dance music producers. “The music really engulfed me,” she says.
Though she recently quit her graphic design job to concentrate on her increasingly popular songs—the video for recent single “Drink I’m Sippin On” is closing in on two million YouTube views—she hasn’t given up on visual art. During a visit to her painting studio in Bushwick, she shows me some of her work. “I was listening to witch house and had broken up with an ex when I was painting this,” she says with a laugh, looking at a mass of intricate, aggressive black lines on white canvas. As the afternoon light streams into the studio, and we consider her paintings, she asks if she can make me curry one of these days.
Yaeji: Just trial and error. In college, I downloaded Ableton and skipped a bunch of classes and played around. And growing up, I learned how to play the piano and the flute to certain extent, and I tried to teach myself how to play guitar, ukulele, things like that. But music was really a short-lived hobby, and I had no idea I would rediscover that hobby, because I always believed myself to be a visual person. All of the music stuff was a surprise.
The overarching similarities in any creative process for me is that I’m more impulsive than others—a lot of thinking less and making a mess.
Initially, I chose Korean because I didn’t want people to understand what I was singing about—and then I discovered that I actually really like how Korean sounds. It’s a very angular, textured sound, which is why a lot of my vocals sound whispery. I was very much focused on the phonetics of it, tied in with cadence and flow.
I love that you call it rapping, because that’s what I really I want others to hear. I definitely feel like I’m rapping. When I’m playing my hybrid live sets, where I’m DJing and mixing in live vocals, it’s created a really amazing feeling for me. Like you’re captivating the audience because you have a mic, and you’re just spitting bars.
What’s nice about being a DJ and an artist at the same time is that it’s pretty much a platform where I’m given an hour to showcase all my favorite songs, and I can play really different stuff without having to stick to type. That gives people an understanding of where I’m coming from that’s deeper than just my production. And it’s always changing.
Typically, the content for what I’m singing or rapping about comes from a little notebook that I take notes in on the subway during my commutes. They’re more emotionally driven. Sometimes when you’re at events or in public, especially in New York, because you’re always around a lot of people, it can be easy get into your personal zone, even though you’re surrounded. You just learn how to do that. It’s crazy, especially at clubs, because DJs create a mood, and sometimes the experience is to just be in that bubble they’re creating and meditate in it.
I have a new song called “Raingurl” that’s the definition of introspection at the club. It’s all from these experiences where I think about the things my music is about, which includes being Korean and American, and therapy, and when people are depressed and how to get out of it. Making music, performing it, seeing it—it’s a vessel for a lot of different thoughts for me. At the same time it’s about having a fun time. I’m going out with my friends and I love hanging out with them. It’s my favorite thing!
Yeah, they came for my birthday last year, when I was playing a small festival here. That was around the time they started to warm up to the idea of me making music, because they saw how seriously I was taking it. When they saw me really putting my all into it live, it resonated. They’ve been very supportive since.
