Album Review: Watch This Liquid Pour Itself by Okay Kaya

There's a blindsiding brute force to much of Watch This Liquid Pour Itself, Kaya Wilkins' second record under the Okay Kaya moniker, and her first released on Jagjaguwar. For bedroom pop that's often melodically velvety (even as it's refreshingly sonically diverse) her astute self-targeted observations never constitute a pulled punch. This pointedness is revealed early on through a darkly comic series of observations on album opener "Baby Little Tween": "I ride the mood/Baby little tween/Mood riding/Riding on your dick." The way Wilkins shifts from cautiously floating across her warm pillowy synth pads to a heavier, sardonic enunciation on "dick" bridges the gap between her fluctuating moods and their earthier repercussions.

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The title of Okay Kaya's first album, Both, implied fluidity and multiplicity, themes that are expanded upon further with her latest LP, Watch This Liquid Pour Itself.   Self-described as "Sade for nihilists," this collection of minimal, jazz-inflected songs shows that Okay Kaya is not afraid to embrace the mundane ugliness of everyday life. With plaintively delivered lines like "Netflix and yeast infection / I know sex with me is mediocre," and "I'll be the crust in your eye," Okay Kaya transforms bodily discomfort into soft poetry ….

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For Kaya Wilkins, songwriting is therapy. On Both, her 2018 debut under the name Okay Kaya, the Brooklyn-via-Norway singer built a small diorama of minimal bedroom pop with lyrics about her mental health, traumas, and desires. Its moments of feeling lost in social and sexual scenarios were oddly relatable, whether earnestly asking a lover to come with her to get an IUD, or exploring her curiosity about BDSM via Matrix costumes.

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