After taking the ‘backwards’ route into music, McKenzie Ellis – aka Mothica – has become one of the most talked-about names in alt. pop. Ahead of her new album Kissing Death she looks back on her strange journey so far, why she won’t be defined by the trauma of her past, and how she seeks to heal a new generation of fans…
McKenzie Ellis is living a life she never expected to. Growing up, she thought she’d only be an amateur bedroom singer, posting covers on the internet – at least that way, she would never be in the same room as the people watching her perform. Being onstage? Terrifying. Not an option. That’s not what people from Oklahoma did – they got ‘real jobs’ instead of pursuing unrealistic dreams.
“I always think of myself as the least ‘musician’ musician in the room,” she admits to K! today, sitting in her room beside a rotating lamp that occasionally lights her face a variety of neon colours. “I’m having to work backwards compared to most people. I’ve had to learn how to sing. When I made covers, I don’t think I sounded good at all. I’d just sing because I had emotions I wanted to get out, but I never considered myself a singer. It was just what I did alone in my room.”
McKenzie's journey to one of the most unique alt. pop stars started on a more conventional path. She went to college to study interactive media, learning skills like coding and graphic design. She toyed with working in visual arts, having spent her youth constantly drawing, even to the point that she was voted 'most artistic' in high school. Developing apps was another possibility, as was working in the music industry in a behind-the-scenes capacity. Yet still she remained a bedroom musician, singing over EDM beats on Soundcloud just for the fun of it. Though she’d grown up absorbing the sounds of rock greats – particularly Green Day and Jimmy Eat World, courtesy of her childhood best friend’s mum – she didn’t touch guitar music till much later. ‘Didn’t you have to be in a band to do that?’ she thought.
One day, she found that one of her covers had been doing serious numbers online. An email landed in her inbox from a major record label executive asking to talk. Thinking it would lead to her being signed, McKenzie dropped out of college faster than you can say ‘big break’. “Then I learned that’s not how the music industry works,” she deadpans. “You don’t drop out because you get one email!”
Regardless, she’d built a toolbox of skills that would end up serving her well when she metamorphosed into Mothica, a name chosen because she identified with the winged insect’s penchant for self-sabotage. McKenzie realised she didn’t want to work for other musicians, she wanted to be at the nucleus of her own project. Starting her own imprint label Heavy Heart with Rise and BMG, she not only has complete creative control of her art, but also the budget to execute her vision. She’s become a multi-hyphenate: writing music, editing videos, designing merch, building her project into something more three-dimensional than just music.
“It’s been a very backwards way in. Most musicians I know, their dream is to get a GRAMMY and sell out a stadium,” McKenzie considers. “I don’t have that same goal. I don’t know [if I can call it] impostor syndrome, but it’s just different because I kind of fell into it.”
“I have to remember why music is special to me”
Underpinning her music – dark, guitar-driven alt. pop with iron-clad melodies so infectious they’ll live rent free in your head for days, if not weeks – is a strong emphasis on a visual universe. Indeed, for her new album Kissing Death, she wrote treatments for 12 music videos, one for each song, that are able to stand alone but have an overarching narrative connecting them.
“I presented a 45-minute PowerPoint convincing my team that it was worth it for me to do 12 music videos, even though I’m not Beyonce or Halsey or any other artists that do visual albums. I was like, ‘I’m gonna make it the world’s cheapest visual album, and I’ll show you why!’” she says, with the self-aware humour that it transpires is a quiet trademark of hers.
How did that side of her artistry become so central to Mothica?
“I think very visually, and I love artists who have super in-depth visuals – Oliver Tree, Lana Del Rey, My Chemical Romance – who do videos that are so much more than just looking cool on a plain backdrop. I think that’s what I like about art: being able to tell my story in a surreal way that makes it more metaphorical. Not just being like, ‘Here’s my trauma.’ That’s what helps me process my emotions.”
Five years ago, while working on her debut album Blue Hour, McKenzie was on a plane that was struck by lightning. It fell through the air abruptly, the pungent smell of smoke filling the cabin. People were screaming. “You could hear their fear,” she remembers.
Her mind was thrown into a place of both anxiety and urgency. ‘I need to finish the album. There’s still art I want to make.’ Afterwards, she wrote a will for the first time. Looking back, it was a landmark moment not just because she survived something so terrifying, but because she desperately wanted to make it out alive.
McKenzie hadn’t always felt that way. She’s been put through more than her fair share, having struggled with depression and addiction for a large part of her life. As she was coming out of middle school, she suffered abuse at the hands of her youth pastor in church. At just 15 years old, she attempted suicide, but continued to grapple with suicidal ideation even after that point.
Suicide is enough of a taboo in itself, but it leads to another question rarely asked when one attempts to take their own life. What happens when you know that you don’t want to die anymore?
“When I got sober, that’s when the fear kicked in,” McKenzie considers. “I realised I did have a lot of things to live for and I wanted to stick around and make more art. Anxiety cropped up because I realised I didn’t want to die. I was like, ‘This is very annoying – new fear unlocked!’”
The other thing that happens when you reach that point, McKenzie says, is a loss of control. In her adolescence, she saw her life as having a fixed ending, thinking that she wouldn’t be alive past the age of 18. Now, she’s 29, and doesn’t have that false handrail to hold onto, because letting life go on, and go where it may, means that what happens next is not something she can dictate.
“It’s very scary,” she admits. “You truly do have to live every day in the moment. I even got a tattoo for that; it says ‘now’. But it’s beautiful to decide that you don’t want to give in to your worst thoughts or your suicidal ideations. Now I have a full life that could lead to all the other art I want to make or all the career things I want to do. I want to write a book or do a TED Talk or buy a house. The world opens up to you in that way.”
Although she’s made it out of all those experiences alive, it doesn’t mean she no longer struggles. The completion and release of Kissing Death was delayed when McKenzie suffered a major depressive episode, and while she’s notched up five years sober from alcohol, she had become addicted to opiates to combat her anxiety and relapsed while working on the record.
“That was something I was grappling with in the lyrics,” she explains. “I’m still a human and not completely cured of all my ailments. I’m never going to be the person that’s like, ‘It gets better, just breathe,’ all those clichés of coming out of the other side of depression. I’m definitely way more into optimistic nihilism. That’s something that’s really helped me through things – when you’ve been through so much and gone through so many rock bottoms, you start to think, ‘Nothing can hurt me now’. I’ve hurt myself the most, you can’t be meaner to me than I’ve been to myself.”
“I’m definitely way more into optimistic nihilism”
When she’s healing in public in this way – and making art from her scar tissue – people will inevitably identify and connect with it. Mothica’s music might well be someone’s way of finding solace, of knowing that somebody out there gets it and has found a way to move through, or at least live with, that pain. McKenzie sees them. It means there are certain standards she holds herself to, and perhaps there’s a sense of discomfort knowing she’s held up as an example to people when she’s not got it all figured out yet. Healing’s messy, after all.
“I do have fans who tell me, ‘I got sober because of you,’ or, ‘You inspire me,’ and I’m like, ‘Not me! I’m sleeping with fig bar wrappers in my bed! Don’t look at me as a shining example of light!’” she laughs.
Artists often hear stories about how their music helped fans get through the toughest of times. Sometimes it’s rewarding. Sometimes it gets a little heavy, perhaps heavier than they readied themselves for. Sometimes things can get a little uncomfortable. When asked how she handles this, and whether there are times it can get a bit much, McKenzie is characteristically open and forthcoming.
“I don’t mind it at all,” she says, even if she can’t really respond to long messages in her DMs, and prefers to talk to fans about their struggles in person at shows. “I’ve never been the mom-friend type, but at my meet and greets, I literally feel like I become a vessel. I’m there to receive [my fans’] pain, make them laugh, take a photo with them, cry with them, hug them. There’s nothing they could say that would scare me away. I love meeting people sometimes more than I love playing shows. I don’t have a lot I can give, other than just listening.
“The meet and greets are like group therapy,” she adds, “but I’m the therapist.”
In the music video for her recent single Toxins, McKenzie is at home, agitated, unable to relax. She knows she’s being watched, but the person keeping constant surveillance on her is none other than the Grim Reaper himself. Presented in his most stereotypical form – black cloak, scythe and all – the skeletal stalker is never far from her house, leaving gruesome gifts on her doormat and remaining omnipresent through her window.
Swap the Reaper for a man with a six-pack and a jaw that could cut glass and you have a scene from a cheesy ’00s romcom. What once was portrayed as romantic is now rightfully seen as downright creepy, but that idea is thrown into relief by the storyline snaking through Mothica’s recent videos. In context, the ridiculousness of the Grim Reaper standing and watching her daily movements makes it almost darkly funny. This sleight-of-hand is the essence of what Kissing Death as an album is all about. It contemplates how we romanticise death, particularly in the context of suicide, then it feeds that phenomenon through a shredder.
“That idea of not romanticising death is something I’ve been super vocal about,” McKenzie explains. “I saw a really young girl on TikTok make a song and the video saw her doing fake drugs made of glitter and romanticising this whole rock’n’roll life. It bothers me now where I’m at, but when I was a teenager, that’s what I was doing. I was on Tumblr looking at really skinny girls and hating my body. I was seeing the rock star life of Amy Winehouse and the 27 Club and thinking I couldn’t possibly live past 18. That was like, ‘Oh, you’re so old.’
“I mean, the kids aren’t on Tumblr now, but those ideals are still so prevalent,” she continues. “You’re like, ‘I should live fast and die young and not think about whatever else I want to do now.’ It put me in so many dangerous situations. I’m shocked I survived half the things I did because I had no sense of fear.”
“I’m shocked I survived half the things I did because I had no sense of fear”
McKenzie says she’s often been told by her friends or her therapist that she’s very self-aware. Kissing Death has a similar, sharp introspectiveness to it too. While it’s a deeply vulnerable record, it also takes risks in how it portrays its subject matter. At points, it seems like McKenzie is flirting with the prospect of glamorising death, but then laughs in its face. Take The Reaper, a sparkly dance-pop track that sounds like a glossy ode to Death as her lover, but the toxicity of what she’s doing and of the way he behaves spills out in its verses – ‘It’s not easy to find somebody dependable / I don’t care that he thinks my life is expendable / At least he’s reliable,’ she sings.
At the core of the album’s narrative is McKenzie’s own story, transformed into a fantastical story arc that heightens the emotion behind it. It starts with fragile lead single Doomed, the visuals of which are a window into teenage years spent making music while beginning to reckon with depression, later taking her to a club show (Red), its basement for a seedy, booze-fuelled afterparty (The Reaper) and even the desert (Mirage). Littered with Easter eggs for particularly devoted fans who have delved deep into the lore, the videos exist as their own self-contained stories so it’s easy to dip in and out if you’re a Mothica newcomer, or a more casual fan.
“There’s three versions of Mothica in this album,” McKenzie points out. “There’s young me; the 2009 emo kid, which is when I first started romanticising death. When I have red hair, that’s me when I was drinking a lot and doing drugs. When I have blonde-brown hair, this is me now, in therapy, coping with the world. I tried to think of this album as a soundtrack. It goes through a lot of different sounds – a lot of fans wanted heavier rock songs, and I’m going to do a remix EP with heavier versions of some of the songs, but I’m also like, ‘You gotta let me explore a little western song for some reason!’”
After all, she’s got to serve herself artistically first. There’s a deeper, therapeutic purpose to that, too.
“I don’t want anyone to have an existential crisis listening to my music. My big thing with this is that I don’t want people to hear this and think, ‘Oh God, is she okay?’ I get to add these surreal elements and more of an artistic flair to real human emotions and I just live in the world creating that. I think that’s very healing to do.”
Kissing Death is released August 23 via Heavy Heart / Rise Records.
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