KAETO has shared her new single ‘Little Me’ accompanied by a self-produced video. With production by Karma Kid and Tom Stafford, this trip hop sway is riven with KAETO’s bruised vocal that’s at once fragile and ripe with smoky allure, wrapped in strings, prodding beats and an elegant production that takes its cues from Portishead or the more downtempo moments of Roisin Murphy’s catalogue. It follows the mesmerising newcomer’s debut release for Polydor last month with her single ‘No Body’. On the basis of just two tracks so far she’s certainly one to keep an eye on.
Talking about the inspiration behind ‘Little Me’, Kaeto says, “I’m a massive trip-hop fan and I adore Beth Gibbons and Portishead, and this song felt like an opportunity to take all that passion for trip-hop and combine it with weird vocals, drone noises, oscillating synthesisers and strings — I wanted to create the feeling of slipping down the toilet bowl. We used an old handheld mic to get the megaphone vocal effect.”
‘Little Me’ comes complete with a mind-bending video featuring a disoriented Kaeto and a cast of hallucinatory characters. She elaborates, “I made the video before I signed with Polydor. My idea was to create a sort of party where everyone has become the exaggerated, caricatured version of themselves that others see. I funded the video myself, so did the whole thing really cheaply: I did all the hair and makeup, all the costuming, and made all the wigs. I got some of my really talented (and very generous) friends together, covered lunch and told everyone they could have any leftover footage for their showreels. It was so fun!”
It was back in 2019 that KAETO first entered the studio with outside producers and began building a sound that would be all her own, but the route she’s taken since is a mark of her maverick and inventive approach to music. One such diversion was enrolling in Clown School, a move designed to throw herself into something creative and spontaneous and shake off the mundanity of modern life. It’s why Kaeto’s music has such a free-spirited, loose-limbed sense of adventure about it. “I’m so unashamed of myself,” she says, “but music is where I go to explore these things.”