Frankly, at 21 years old, and with five full-length albums already under her belt, the music press should be calling Bob Pollard of Guided By Voices for a paternity test to prove that Toronto’s Giuliana Mormile of Kicksie is not his daughter.
With rapid-fire Bandcamp uploads beginning in 2018, Mormile’s warm brand of emo pop has evolved with every release and pushed Kicksie’s sound into bigger and bigger orbits.
“I’m not really sure what specifically keeps me going, but nothing can make me stop,” she laughs. “I think about (music) from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed. It consumes my life in a way that would probably be viewed as extremely unhealthy if I wasn’t as productive as I am with it. It gives me such a rush and such a purpose that I never got as a kid. School was horrifically difficult for me, and I was never provided with the resources that could have helped me, so I think it’s also out of survival now too.
“I really can’t do anything else. I don’t have the skillset to survive in the corporate or academic world. Because of that I can be excessively hard on myself, and I compare myself to others constantly. If I don’t perform to the standards I set for myself, I have to push myself until I do. I realize the music industry is way over-saturated, so I need to have these standards in order to achieve a successful full-time career and stand out in a positive and fruitful way. Saying this makes me feel like a mean boss but I really do take music seriously.”
August 2020 saw the release of All My Friends, Kicksie’s fourth full-length album, which found Mormile intertwine her melodic charms with dreams of joining the ranks of 2000s radio punks. A summer sleeper hit, the album was reissued by buzzing U.S. label Get Better Records and Ontario’s Blacktop Records.
Kicksie returns this April with Slouch courtesy of new label home, Counter Intuitive Records.
“When I released my last record, All My Friends, it was a digital-only release. I was an independent musician and didn’t really have the means to be making physical releases of my music. But Get Better Records were down to make cassettes for it, and then soon after, Blacktop Records wanted to make vinyl. We did these insane liquid, glitter-filled vinyl that sold out so fast. It was such an awesome experience to get to hold them and be like, ‘Wow. This is real, and it exists.’
“I think through all of that I eventually caught the attention of Counter Intuitive, who reached out to us, and that was just how that happened.”
Even as incredibly talented she is as a musician and songwriter, Mormile sometimes daydreams of spending the day as someone else.
“I feel like if I could be anyone, I think I would be either Tyler the Creator, Frank Ocean or Jacob Collier. I have never listened to a single Jacob Collier song; I know absolutely nothing about him, but I’ve seen some live performance clips before, and I would like to just enter his brain to try and soak up any knowledge I can, and that’s literally my only reasoning,” she laughs.
“Maybe I should start listening. I picked Frank Ocean because I need to know what he’s doing instead of dropping the album. And Tyler, mostly for the same reason as Jacob, I just want to see how he works in the studio and his production process.”
Photo courtesy of Alice Hirsch
