On the Rise
Siichaq

Whether you’re lost in conversation with a friend, or pouring your heart out on stage in front of thousands of hungry faces, you’re reaching deep within and accessing some hidden part of yourself. It’s hardcore, revealing, occasionally embarrassing, and demanded of us every day. After years of practice, you’d think it’d start to come easy, but often, as the Atlanta-based rock musician Kenie Mason – better known by her Inuit name Siichaq – says, it’s not something intuitive. “Vulnerability is a practice, not a destination. It’s very intentional. Every time it takes effort and thought,” she says. This trading of armoured walls for an open door, Siichaq says, is a conscious choice you should choose to make every moment you possibly can.

Calling from her sun-soaked home Georgia home, Mason sits beside her little orange cat Pumpkin, both of them basking in the afternoon light, relatively unbothered by the barking of the “shelter-special” Fender, whose name Mason openly questions. (“Wait, is that corny?” she laughs.) Her animals, appropriately, are close to her heart. “I’ve always had this lifelong connection to animals. I’m neurodivergent, so it’s a very dedicated interest for me. There’s no need to perform normalcy, no social etiquette to adhere to. I can be unapologetically myself around animals and receive the same love regardless,” she says.

It’s an admiration that’s left her with encyclopaedic levels of animal knowledge ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, and she often finds herself sharing some of her favourites on stage. “There’s an animal called the binturong. It’s the largest civet found in Southeast Asia, and they smell like buttered popcorn because they have scent glands near their butts that produce the same chemical reaction as browning bread,” she says. “Civets also eat coffee cherries and poop them out, and that’s made into coffee. Something about digesting and returning the beans makes them taste better. I think that's really weird, but to each their own.”

For Mason, sharing facts like these is something of a litmus test for true fans. Calling from South Carolina, with my tamagotchi beeping incessantly on my desk, I feel an instant connection with this gentle 20-something from the Deep South, and find it hard to imagine her creating the songs she does: industrial tracks marked by angry, raucous guitars and moody, post-punk influences. (Shame on me for forgetting that some of the bands with the most relentless riffs were created by the most shy and gentle of people.) 

Between bursts of stringent guitars and fuzzed-out riffs, Mason seethes over the suffocation of expectant eyes (“World Equestrian Center”) and being hated for the skin that she’s in (“Female Rage”). It’s that compelling contradiction – gentle instincts and anger-fuelled soundscapes – that runs throughout her new record The Righteous Sword. The latter emotion, Mason says, has been around since she was a kid. Always simmering underneath the surface, she harnessed it when she discovered the grungy, dark discography of Nirvana. “I didn’t quite understand the lyrics,  but the anger in the music really resonated with me. It almost felt like permission to feel angry,” she says. 

Emboldened, she started picking up guitar lessons soon after, though the structure never quite suited her. “I’m a very tactile person, so eventually I just started figuring it out on my own.” It was an intentional choice that has become a cornerstone of her sound, collaged and hodge-podged, murky and slow burning. “I feel like theory takes the magic out of music. The more I know, the less fun I’m having. Ignorance is truly bliss in some cases. I don’t wanna know the technique behind this. I want it to feel like some magical experience of creativity,” she says.

At first, those moments were solitary. “I really have a very hard time writing in front of people,” Mason admits. Over time, however, Mason learned the lesson that she taught us before: that vulnerability is a choice worth making. Now, she taps the shoulders of trusted collaborators like Ben Wulkan (member of Atlanta band Lunar Vacation) and Evan Dangerfield (an engineer who's worked with Finn Wolfhard), two core players that inspired her to change her approach. On her new record, she came to them with half-finished songs instead of her usual complete visions, which is how tracks like “Doing Damage”, the album’s closing single, came to life. “I came up with the chords, and Ben helped me flesh out the arrangement in the studio, and then we tracked almost all of the instruments before I even had a melody or lyrics,” Mason says. The switch, she says, was unnerving at first. “That was new and it was very scary, but Ben and Evan are both so talented, and we’d worked together for a long time on Catcher. It also somehow felt very organic.” 

The change gave her space to write lyrics that felt truer than ever. “I usually try to say something more profound than just my immediate feelings, some connection to my internal world, or a theme that connects what I’m feeling to a broader social or cultural experience,” Mason says. But this time, that impulse gave way. She was sick for most of the album’s recording, both physically and mentally worn down, and the overwhelm became the only thing she could write about. “There’s no metaphor or literary device to shroud my exact experience,” she says. “It ended up being a very honest song.” 

For Mason, the process of songwriting is constantly evolving in this way: the spontaneity of artistry, the gravitational pull of a new idea that suddenly eclipses the one you’ve been chasing. It’s a constant experiment, but this one, she says, felt especially right. “I always get this idea in my head of, this is how I want the album to come out, and never once has it actually translated that way. There was something kind of relieving about the hard part being done first,” she says. “Coming up with instrumental parts is not my forte. Writing is definitely my more natural skill, so shout out to Ben and Evan for picking up my slack.”

With the help of Wulkan and Dangerfield, the pivot changed not just the record’s sound, but her process for making it. Still, “Doing Damage” wasn’t the hardest song on the album to write. That distinction, she says, belongs to “The Fear”. “I didn't wanna record it, really. It’s a really personal topic, and it felt a little obvious. If the person it’s about heard it, they’d immediately know, and that was really intimidating,” Mason says. But Dangerfield championed the song, and Mason struck a deal: he could do whatever he wanted with it. “If it turns out cool and it makes sense on the record, we’ll go for it,” she remembers thinking. The song became, in her words, entirely his baby, and she thought it was too pretty to let die. 

Releasing the song might have given Mason pause, justifiably, but she says it was cathartic to see something painful transform. Honestly, she says it’s rarely ever the innate vulnerability of the songs she writes that scare her anyway; it’s the act of being on a stage itself. “The contents of the song don’t really have much bearing on my mental state when I’m performing, but I’ve had bouts of social anxiety on and off throughout my life,” she says. “I get onstage after saying hi to a million people and meeting the other bands, and I feel like a fish out of water. It’s still ultimately very fun to perform, and something I’m grateful to get to do, but being in an environment with a lot of people and a lot of social expectations is a lot of pressure.”

Whether it’s playing a half-finished idea for Wulkan and Dangerfield in a living room, or staring back into an audience’s expectant eyes, a reluctance to being seen is a throughline that has underlined her entire career. Still, it’s a discomfort that she continues to meet bravely and deliberately. “Collaboration is a challenge to become more open, to share things you wouldn’t normally share. I think that’s such a beautiful thing,” she says. “That song, despite the emotional weight, was cathartic to sing. It’s deeply personal, and to do it in a way that felt safe was very meaningful to me. I couldn’t have done it without Ben and Evan.”

If it’s not her collaborators that help Mason through, it’s often other unexpected sources of connection. Mason honours one such relationship in her video for “Tight Rope”, which she dedicates to a dear friend: a 70-something farmer named Ellen. “My best friend from the time I was like thirteen was Ellen. She had a farm about 45 minutes outside of Atlanta. My mom and grandma took me there when I was a kid. They knew I was struggling, and they knew how much I love animals. She had so many rescue animals, and such a profound respect for nature. I learned so much from her about how to be a steward of the earth.” 

Ellen, a distant friend of Mason’s grandmother, took to Mason fast. The feeling was mutual. Unfortunately, after years of friendship cultivated over days on the farm, the lovely human that was Ellen passed away in January of this year. “I could never do sleepovers, but with Ellen it was just immediate, total trust. She genuinely saved my life, and shaped who I am.” Moulded with love and strengthened by the facing of fears, that shape resembles something like a sword.