Kiki T’s New EP ‘Aqua Eterna’ and Why She Never Wants to See the Bottom of the Cup

Kiki Towner has a complicated relationship with beverages. Not in any way that requires an intervention, just in the way that tells you something about how she moves through the world. She is on her third matcha latte of the afternoon, which she would like you to know she desperately wishes was a bottle of champagne or a 7-Eleven Coke slurpee, and which she will almost certainly top off before it gets anywhere near empty. This is a thing she does with every drink, she explains: adds to it, layers it, green tea on top of matcha, a shot of tequila in there, some LaCroix, some pineapple juice. She does not want to see the end of the cup. “In a really fucked up way,” she says, “that sums up all the things that excite me and destroy me at once in this life.”

She named her new EP after it.

Aqua Eterna, everlasting water, dropped this week as the next chapter in the rollout toward ROWE, a fourteen-track project due this fall. It is the work of a woman who grew up on an island, left it the first chance she got, and has spent the years since in a state of beautiful, willful overflow. The EP’s title did not come from a philosophy seminar. It came from the bottom of a cup she refused to reach. That distinction matters. Kiki T is not an artist who theorizes her way into a concept. She lives it first, builds the creative retreat in the woods, ends up in Monaco watching something she can’t explain, wakes up from a dream at five in the morning and goes outside to write in the dark, and then, later, figures out what it all meant.

She is parked in her garage when we connect, garage door closed, engine off, radio on somewhere in the background of a video call she is conducting from the driver’s seat of her car at 3:30 in the afternoon. She is wearing a red studded jacket covered in silver spike and pearl studs along the shoulders and lapels, open over a pink gingham tie-front bralette printed with tiny red chili peppers, red low-rise jeans, and a delicate gold body chain. Midriff out, in a closed garage. When asked why the car, she does not overthink it. “For some reason I do my best writing in the car,” she says. “And being shut in the garage in the dark makes it feel almost like I’m underwater. No one can get to me in here. Just me and whatever I want to write.”

She is, for the record, not what the music industry expects when it hears the words “dark pop feminist.” She is warmer than that. Funnier than that. She is also, within about four minutes of talking, onto the patriarchy, abortion rights, ICE, and the particular breed of psychological warfare the beauty industry wages on women before they’re old enough to know what hit them. The warmth and the fury coexist without any apparent tension. This is, it turns out, exactly the point.

Kiki T was born on Oahu, Hawaii, and was, by her own account, shy as fuck until she wasn’t. Growing up in a family that included a master-level classical guitarist brother and a prima ballerina sister, she describes herself not so much as the black sheep but as the explorer, the one who wanted to try on different lives rather than commit to mastering one. “Maybe I’d feel differently if I’d found my vocation earlier,” she says. “Maybe not. Who knows.”

What she found instead was a long and sincerely chaotic run through other people’s ideas of what a career looks like. Photography. A small fashion line. Large-scale event planning. Home remodeling. A PhD program in cognitive neuroscience that she abandoned when she decided a windowless room with fluorescent lighting for the rest of her life was, in her words, pure hell. From the outside this looks like a woman who couldn’t commit. From the inside, she says, it looks like something else entirely. “From the outside I look like that 45-year-old asshole who keeps dumping women because he can’t find the right one,” she says. “But I did find her. I found the thing that ignites my whole neuro-network and settles my nervous system and allows me to be a wordy bitch and tell stories and talk about feelings all day and be messy and chaotic and a fucking fashion icon.”

The thing she found was music. And it found her in the least likely way imaginable.

It was 2020. The world had shut down. Kiki, characteristically, was in the woods finishing a remote cabin she was building, designing it as a creative retreat, she explains, for herself and for others to rent. (“Thanks, ADD,” she adds, without elaborating.) She had the Hamilton soundtrack on a loop. One night, somewhere around four or five in the morning, she woke from a dream in which she could rap. Not metaphorically. She woke up genuinely convinced the skill had transferred from dreamland, went out onto the porch in the dark, and wrote her first rhymes on paper she could barely see in the dark, in handwriting she can barely read in daylight. “It was terrible,” she has said before. “But not nearly as terrible as it should have been.”

The content of those first rhymes says everything you need to know about who Kiki T is going to be as an artist. Half of them, she says, were about the political and social justice grievances piling up in real time: the particular species of bullshit emanating from the Trump administration, the immigration cruelties of ICE, the sexism baked into every layer of the news. The other half were about painting her kitchen and what beverages she preferred. “Everything can be a song or a rap or a story when you want it to be,” she says. Then: “But yeah. Fuck Trump and ICE and all that.”

A month-long writing challenge became a year. A year became six years. Six years became a full creative career, thirty songs deep in 2025 alone, four to six sessions a week with some of the most interesting producers in Los Angeles. She still cannot play a single instrument or identify a note on a piano, a fact she mentions with no apology and some genuine delight. “All the free space on my mental hard drive is filled with words and melodies,” she says. “And somehow it’s working.”

She would, she says, let all of it burn. Asked about objects she has carried through her life, things she would grab in a hurry, she considers it genuinely and concludes she has no particular devotion to anything she can own. “I’d probably just let it all burn,” she says. This is consistent with how she thinks about her own creative trajectory, which she describes in terms that are either very zen or very physics-dependent. “I feel like there’s a world I could have missed it,” she says of music. “I rethink about that all the time. In all the multiverses I either find music every time or almost never. It’s either the string that ties all my possible destinies together or it’s a glitch in the matrix.”

The song that got there first, the one that cracked something open, was not a rap. It was Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club,” which Kiki heard in early COVID and describes as flipping a switch in her brain. Before that, Tracy Chapman: the story-telling, the specificity, the way a song could carry a whole life inside three minutes. She holds up Tracy Chapman as proof that music can hold something true.She has been compared to Diane Warren and Bonnie McKee, which she receives with the slightly stunned politeness of someone who isn’t sure what to do with a compliment that size. Warren has written for everyone from Beyoncé to Aerosmith without ever being boxed in by genre. McKee co-wrote six of Katy Perry’s biggest hits and always kept one foot on the stage herself. Kiki says she is probably somewhere between them. “I love writing with other people but I’ve really started to enjoy the way I’m evolving as an artist myself,” she says. “I think the missing piece for me is unlocking the same comfort in a live scenario. I’ve had glimpses of what that would feel like on stage. I’m a bit worried that once I open that door further I may not want to come back to reality.”

She says this like it would be a problem.

There is a recent story that illustrates, better than any genre breakdown could, exactly how Kiki T’s creative brain works. She was talking with a fellow songwriter, got inspired by his life, told him at the time she was planning to write a song about it. She sent him the mix. He wrote back convinced it was a love song about him and was, by her account, shocked. “I wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship with him,” she says. “I forget that not everyone writes from the perspective that I do, where fantasy and reality are just constantly flowing into each other. I forget that isn’t how everyone sees the world, even other creatives.” She pauses. “I wasn’t surprised by his reaction. I was surprised that it didn’t even occur to me as a possibility.”

She describes herself as the love child of Jimmy Buffett and Paris Hilton. Island ease wrapped in hot-girl chaos. She came up with the description when someone first asked her to explain herself and it stuck, which is either the most efficient branding decision in recent memory or just the truth, and with Kiki T there is increasingly no meaningful difference between the two. She brings up Paris Hilton unprompted, specifically a video she thinks about often: someone in a crowd, the music gatekeeper type who finds it cosmically offensive that someone can be both pretty and talented, as if beauty and ability are a zero-sum situation the universe simply wouldn’t allow, is holding a sign accusing Paris of lip-syncing. Paris just stops, looks at them, and says, plainly, Why can’t I be blonde and hot and good at this? “I think about that all the time,” Kiki says. The irony being, of course, that Kiki is exactly that person, and they will probably come for her too eventually.

There is a version of Kiki T that a certain type of person might mistake for lightweight. The party girl from Hawaii with the coke slurpee fixation and the glittering, sun-soaked chaos energy. That version is real. It is also, she would like you to know, not the whole story, and she is not particularly interested in making it easy for you to flatten her into a type. “If you want to know me,” she says, “listen to the bridges. That is where I discover what the song is really about. The verses are story time. Some fiction, some nonfiction. But the bridge is where I find out what I’m actually saying.”

Aqua Eterna is, at its core, a record about the gap between what looks like fullness and what actually fills you up. Kiki describes its emotional world with the kind of cheerful brutality she applies to most things: “It’s a hungover party girl who’s actually pretty bummed there’s not more of an emotional connection. It’s someone who’s single and just so fucking happy to be single, and no one seems to understand that they don’t want anyone coming in and fucking up their peace.” She pauses. “It’s a beach vacation that you pay for with your body, your attention, your time.”

The EP’s lead single “Rich Kids” has a darker origin story than the packaging suggests. Years before she was a songwriter, Kiki was traveling through Europe and ended up at the American Bar at the Hôtel de Paris in Monaco, where she spent a night watching an older man cycle through three different women at his table, each competing for his attention in a world built specifically around extreme wealth and the particular transaction that wealth makes possible. She wasn’t a writer at the time. The night just stayed a story in her head until she started building the character of “Rich Kids” and found she had source material. “I do that a lot in my writing,” she says.

The song puts the listener inside the perspective of the woman at that table rather than above her, and it does not flinch. Kiki has a specific view on why. “I never think about who’s inside and outside the world of the character,” she says. “To me we all have to be in the world, even the listener. If I’m not comfortable stepping inside, how is anyone else going to be. I love my characters and all their flaws.”

Underneath the character study, “Rich Kids” is asking a harder question, one that Kiki has clearly been turning over for a while: whose desires are these, exactly? Who benefits from a world that teaches women their peak value is tied to their youth, their beauty, their proximity to the right powerful men? “Hell yes I believe that,” she says when asked if the system is designed to keep power exactly where it already is. “The patriarchy, the beauty industry, organized religion, our backward government. The busier we are trying to starve ourselves into weak shadows of ourselves and obsessing about the right skin regime, the less energy we can use to take up the space and the power that women deserve and the world requires from us.” She is warming up now. “Women don’t even hit their creative peak until after 50. Why are we telling women to become invisible once they hit maturity? Go away.”

She is not, to be clear, judging the woman at the table in Monaco. She likes yachts, she says. Just not everyone on them.

“Mine” and “The Good Kind” are her two favorite songs on the EP, and she describes them as complete opposites that share one central preoccupation. “Mine” is about using someone else to escape yourself and discovering that real connection finds its way in anyway. “The Good Kind” is about using a place to escape a person, distracting yourself on vacation with new faces and new cities, and finding that it mostly works. Mostly. “I guess that’s a really central arc in a lot of the music I make,” she says. “I love to play with all the heat and the dazzling bubbles, but at the end of the day, we all want that, right? We all want the connection. We all want the love. We all want the safety of someone who sees you for exactly who you are and stays.”

She describes “Mine” with a precision that makes clear she has thought about this a great deal: at its core is the idea that no one else can own you. Not the person who gets under your skin. Not the one who changes your story. You belong to yourself, which is both the consolation and the whole complicated problem. “This isn’t the album where the girl gets the guy, or leaves him and finds her own empowerment,” she says. “This album is about filling that internal cup up and trying different things out. Finding a way to connect and feel seen, even among all the shiny, expensive, dazzling objects on some rich guy’s yacht.”

The title’s deeper logic comes, as most of Kiki’s deeper logic does, from that mundane and specific and slightly absurd habit of adding to her drinks. She does not want to see the end. “I never wanted the summer to end,” she says. “I didn’t want youth to end. I just wanted to keep flowing and flowing and flowing until the cup overflows and I’m laughing, covered in a ridiculous frozen beverage. Then what will I do? I’ll jump in the ocean and wash it all away.”

Kiki T is a feminist the way some people are left-handed: entirely, and not particularly interested in debating it. She will tell you she would never sleep with a man who wasn’t one, and she will tell you exactly why with zero prompting and considerable enthusiasm. “You know what makes me NOT want to fuck?” she says. “Laws that take away my bodily autonomy. Wide-reaching abortion bans that treat women like children or incubators. Extremely unsexy.” She does not moderate this.

Her politics show up in the music the way they show up in conversation: not planted, not announced, just present. “I’m writing it,” she says. “Fuck ICE, fuck Trump, go feminists. I’m not trying to convince anyone, but I’m zero percent shy about my beliefs. They just are, and sometimes I write about them.” The first rap she ever wrote, at five in the morning on a dark porch in the woods, was about all of this. The political and the personal have never been separate territories for her.

She does not worry about alienating people. She thought about this recently with a friend and concluded that being fully yourself means 15 to 30 percent of the world is simply not going to like you. “But another 30 percent might really get to know you,” she says. “And 100 percent will trust you. The truth sounds different. And I’m not interested in using one ounce of my energy worrying about people I don’t agree with not agreeing with me.” She does not think badly of them, she adds. She just doesn’t think about them.

Her father asked her recently whether her target demographic was men or women. She said women, no question. “Don’t get me wrong, half my listeners are men, and that’s cool as fuck,” she says. “But I’m a woman. I’m writing to and for myself, so obviously I’m the target demographic. If it doesn’t make me feel something, it’s never getting made.” The industry, she points out, has spent considerable energy telling artists what perfection looks like: pitch-perfect sound, frictionless image, politics that offend no one. She is not interested. Suno can give you pitch-perfect and expensive production, she notes, but young people have shown they do not give two shits about what Suno can sing them. “If Suno wrote ‘Rich Kids’ instead of me,” she says, “who’s going to wonder what I was doing in Monaco in the first place?”

Rejection, she has decided, is genuinely good for you. It keeps asking the same question: do you really believe it? Do you really want it? Every time you get rejected and keep going, she says, it reminds your entire identity that you do. “Let’s just say I’ve answered that question a lot,” she says. “And I am not unsure anymore.”

There is a question people ask Kiki T constantly, which is how much of the music is real. She reaches for Stephen King to answer it. In On Writing, King describes modeling characters off real people and then, you know, adding aliens. She does something like that. She does not have to be in a breakup to write a breakup song, but she has had breakups. The emotions in the songs are real. Everything else is up for grabs. “There’s a type of emotional time travel you get to do in performing or songwriting,” she says. “You dip into different experiences you’ve had and use them to fuel a fantastical storyline. The places and some of the characters are real. But what I do with them is up to me.”

She will tell you that the most vulnerable thing she has ever written is a song she has not released. Some songs are just for her.

She will also tell you, without a beat of hesitation, that she does not have a line between what goes into a song and what stays private. “I’m not a particularly private person when it comes to music,” she says. “And if needed I can always build a character to protect the innocent.” She is quiet for a moment. “I can’t imagine trying to write a song to hurt someone unless they are really truly a predator piece of flesh garbage, and in that situation I’m finally fine naming the song their Instagram handle. Not sorry.”

What does making music give her that nothing else does? She does not hesitate. “I get to know myself. I get to find out who’s really deep inside the extremely intense and complicated little human I am. I get to find out.” It costs her, she adds, the freedom of being lazy and not giving a fuck. She misses that sometimes. Only a little. Lyrics run through her head every night and keep her awake, which she suspects is either the nature of the creative process or, she says cheerfully, a tumor pressing on her temporal lobe.

What is she afraid of? She used to be afraid she would wake up one day and not be able to write anymore. That fear is gone now. “Current fear: that my music could hurt someone. It’s a weird fear. But it brings me so much joy to make it that the idea of it ever causing harm is the only thing that’s ever made me pause at a lyric.”

She is asked what makes her hopeful, and she talks about her sister. They were listening to new music together last year and Kiki said she couldn’t believe how much better the songs were getting, and her sister laughed and said: You mean you’re surprised that when you do something every day, you actually get good at it? Kiki thinks about that a lot. The idea that people who have watched her get better might be inspired to try something that seems absurd and surprise themselves. That is the legacy she wants. Not critical acclaim. Not a Grammy. Permission. “Gave them permission to start writing at 50 or painting at 70,” she says. “Made them feel like there are other people on the planet who completely understand and gave their perspective a voice.”

There is one last question. One thing to say to someone who has never heard her music.

She does not pause.

“Fuck the patriarchy.”

She tops off her matcha. She does not want to see the end of the cup.

Review

★★★★★ 5/5

In our exclusive interview, Kiki T talks 'Aqua Eterna,' the cup she never lets run empty, and why she never wants to see the bottom of it.