Once upon a time I was a Kimbra stan, so it felt like running into an old crush to get the assignment for her show last Thursday at Webster Hall in Manhattan. In fact, she has a song about this: “I remember gold days / Under love’s warm haze,” she reminisced in “Old Flame,” from her first album. “Where did all the love go?”
That was over a decade ago. I’ve had enough time since then to move across the country, give myself bangs, grow it all out, chop it twice, and lose a little of my taste for pop music. Meanwhile Kimbra released three more albums, the latest fresh off the press in January, called A Reckoning. Like its title hints, this album marks an era of change for Kimbra. Sometime before its creation she broke with Warner Records, who wanted to amend the terms of her contract by choosing the producer for her next five albums. But for Kimbra, to not have full creative control was an unacceptable caveat upon her art. She refused and split ways, producing and releasing A Reckoning on her own terms and at her own cost, literally.
The producer she went with was Ryan Lott of Son Lux, an experimental group that you might know from scoring Everything Everywhere All At Once, the 2022 movie now up for a Best Picture Oscar. Learning about the commonality between the movie and the album was an “aha” moment for me since at the core of both is schizophrenic, multi-directional identity crisis. Kimbra’s overarching genre has always been pop and A Reckoning still matches that label, but the further we get from her first album, the more her sound is overwhelmed by her vast library of influences, from mathy metalcore band Dillinger Escape Plan to the intimate funk of Prince to Bjork’s avant-garde act. A Reckoning is flooded with these sonic ideas and leaves the listener to wade through it all. It takes fortitude and maybe prior Kimbra knowledge to encounter the spikiness of “Replay!” and “Gun,” and the bombast of “GLT” and “LA Type.” Other songs are saved by her maximalism, like “New Habit” and “Personal Space,” which feel a little generic melody-wise.
A Reckoning’s muddied styles compete with its overall concept of personal reflection and reinvention. Its album cover is in my experience, the classic “my most raw and honest album yet” move of many musicians (always the black-and-white portrait of the artist, often nude; see Christina Aguilera’s Liberation, Selena Gomez’ deluxe Revival, Emma Ruth Rundle’s Engine of Hell) and they vary in exactly what this means. Sometimes it’s stripping down instrumentation to piano and guitar; sometimes it’s thematic, the ugly truth instead of pretty lies. For Kimbra’s record I think it’s a textural rawness, jagged sounds that are purposefully unrefined and unsightly. But listening to it can be a chore, and thus thinking about her split from Warner Bros gives me the same feeling I get thinking back to the days when my mom begged me not to cut my bangs and I did it anyway, brushing her opinions off as “not getting it.” Turns out she was right and knew me better than I knew myself, knew what would flatter me and that the Grimes look wouldn’t. Kimbra should have stayed with her label. Listening to A Reckoning, one gets the sense a more commercial sound might have worked better.
I was excited to see if these songs would hit me more personally live; after all that was my experience in 2014, seeing Kimbra perform The Golden Echo, which I couldn’t stop listening to afterwards. Webster Hall was multi-leveled and far more spacious than the small Salt Lake City venue I saw her in, though a little less crowded. The audience I remember from back then was gone, gone the bashful tumblr-ites of chokers, American Apparel and soft grunge. Our old indie darling has maintained a more sustainable audience: fans that have grown up alongside Kimbra into her discography’s new broody maturity. Groomed beards, IPAs, Dickies cargo pants—a little male-heavy for a pop artist, but then again Kimbra is a beautiful woman who captivated millennials in the heyday of the 2010s’ alt-pop scene along with Carly Rae Jespen and Charli XCX. When she stepped onstage I understood her appeal again. She looked fabulous, wearing a tight bandage top over shorts and an enormous trailing skirt and—were those Marc Jacobs heels? It was couture, rock and roll, mega sexy, exactly what you want a pop icon to wear.
First visually commanding, then vocally, Kimbra held the whole place in a hush as she carried the mic to the middle of the stage and started off with “Save Me,” the first from the album. She blew it away. The Radiohead-esque chord progression set the mood and the sheer quality of her live voice had me doubting my doubts. Webster Hall felt filled with an electric tension, making me believe a true popstar’s mystique might be Kimbra’s yet. However, past the beginning of the concert this feeling didn’t always hold up. For one, the supporting band consisted only of a drummer and a keyboardist, and brief appearances of Kimbra’s guitar excited but didn’t last long. Much of the set relied on a microwaved backing track that undermined the main course of her voice. At least the precision with which she delivered all fifteen songs from the album, plus five more, built faith based on her vocal skill alone.
Kimbra filled the spaces between songs with commentary on the emotional origins and aims of each one, although she acknowledged “I’m much more comfortable singing than talking.” I would agree. Kimbra has never been the type to invite the audience too closely into her personal space (actually the name of one of her new songs) and besides a thrilling entrance she did not possess a natural stage presence. She came across friendly but cold, tossing around words like “adversity” and “striving” as if giving a motivational speech, maybe one to keep herself going. Sometime in the middle an audience member began heckling, shouting what sounded like praise one moment and mockery the next, as Kimbra was describing why she wrote “Foolish Thinking.” The song is addressed to her future daughter but this incident gave it a new meaning, like she was singing encouragement to herself. It ended up feeling sweet and vulnerable. Before performing “GLT” a bit later, she bemoaned dating in post-pandemic New York City and took the chance to remind us that she is mostly just a normal girl trying to survive problems all too familiar to most of us, and I could see it.
Her set delivered many moments of triumph, most from her prior repertoire. Her 2023 rendition of “Settle Down” was easily the best number of the night. She impressively beatboxed into a looper to get the rhythm going, with spare accompaniment up until the chorus. At “star so light and star so bright” the band came alive, baring sweeping sevenths up the keys and real drums reaching our bones. She encore’d with my old favorite “Cameo Lover” and had everyone in the audience singing and dancing along. Playing music critic that night, I felt directly called out and touched by the refrain, “open up your heart.” Cameras came out for “Top of the World” and its tribal beats brought back some of that otherworldly drama invoked in “Save Me.” And although “LA Type” isn’t my favorite on the new album, it was fun to see an audience member with a crazy long wig and a surrounding posse getting down to it and lip-syncing every word. I could tell these were true fans, ones that have been around since Kimbra has been Kimbra.
But who is Kimbra today, and how is her art relevant, are questions that A Reckoning, both recorded and live, asks but does not answer. Kimbra always wanted to be a pop star and she also wanted to subvert expectations. Pop stars are expected to follow a certain trajectory: if they start out sweet and wholesome, they will eventually shed this image—and their clothes—and introduce a darker side. Kimbra did the exact opposite. She entered the cultural consciousness buck naked against the wall with another man in the music video for “Somebody That I Used to Know” and then unironically promoted traditional gender roles in “Settle Down” and called for reading the Bible over tarot cards in “Posse.” She once rocked a 1950s-inspired look complete with classic red lip and pin-up bangs. Referencing the past, she styled herself and her music so as to achieve success and subversion at the same time. But she no longer has a cohesive style; therefore, the culture at large doesn’t know how to make sense of her output.
Losing her bangs for the cover of A Reckoning and on tour was a big step noted by fans online. A newly bare forehead does seem particularly metaphoric to Kimbra baring her soul, being more vulnerable, and moving forward. At the end of the concert she confessed, “Like any pop artist I hope to gain a fanbase that will grow with me,” before plunging into her last piece of the night, “Version of Me.” Her voice swelled and echoed hauntingly like an ancient mourning song; canned violins came in and Kimbra conducted them with her arms and landed in a sort of shrug with the line “Stay for the person I’ll be.” It’s just hard to imagine a future for Kimbra. The concert felt like a magical window back to an old self and an old time for me, not a set of songs I imagine listening to after the show. Her career relies on the still-devoted believers who fell in love with her music long ago, and the rest of us are giving an occasional, nostalgic relisten to the songs of her past.
