There can’t be many twentysomethings who would take making their live debut in front of 17,000 people at the personal invitation of Prince in their stride, but little seems to ruffle the spookily self-assured King. “Prince wouldn’t have you there unless he thought you were ready for it,” says Amber Strother serenely, of their support slot on the last of his 21 nights at the Los Angeles Forum. “He knew we were.”
Prince had clearly been paying attention to the excitement around the trio’s debut EP The Story, which found fans in the Roots’ Questlove and Erykah Badu. But after the EP and the gig came a couple of singles and, then, nothing. What perhaps looked like a failure to deliver, due to a bout of hype-induced paralysis, was – according to the group – simply the sign of their “perfectionist attitude”. And so, last month, five years after the Prince show, they finally returned with their debut album, We Are King.
This is the reason the band are in the UK and why we’re sitting together in a north London cafe, sharing an espresso and mint tea. An hour in King’s company could easily be mistaken for a positivity workshop: Anita is reserved and says very little but the Strother twins are supernaturally polite, talking a lot about fulfilment and self-expression as their motivation.
If it’s the kind of Californian chat that strikes an odd note in grey London, then their album proves that it’s a genuine expression. Recorded in their home studio, We Are King is a retro-futurist mix of plush R&B, loved-up soul and cosmic jazz, highlighting Anita and Amber’s silken harmonies, with echoes of Disney soundtracks and Nintendo pop. They feel like an antidote to mainstream R&B, something both storied and original. King are happy to deflect the compliment.
“I’d say it’s an alternative,” says Paris, a graduate from the Berklee College of Music (the largest college of contemporary music in the world) and a a multi-instrumentalist. “Our music is influenced by such a wide range of genres that, although it does live in the R&B and soul world, that’s not where it draws its influences from.
“We might not be trying to reproduce a chord pattern,” she continues, “but we’ll be trying to recreate the feeling you get from a certain cadence you hear in Ravel. Or the feeling you have when you’re listening to something New Age-y, or from a videogame. Our aesthetic is rooted in some odd places.”
The twins grew up, like Prince, in Minneapolis. Their middle school specialised in fine art and playing a stringed instrument was compulsory. In 2004, aged 18, Paris left for Berklee on a scholarship. Amber, who describes herself back then as “very shy and terrified of the stage”, stayed in Minneapolis, working as a manicurist in their father’s beauty salon. It took the persistence of keyboardist, producer, musical director for Prince and salon regular Morris Hayes to convince her to pursue music. When Paris moved to LA after graduating, she met fellow Berklee student Anita. It was when Amber visited her twin on their 23rd birthday that the women realised – as Amber recalls – “the three of us together was something very special”.
King share a closeness that breeds confidence and manifests as righteous independence. Their LP was released on their own label, King Creative, and Paris, whose studio skills are largely self-taught, is their sole producer. Their name, they say, is a statement about pride and self-realisation as young, black Americans.
“It’s a very strong name,” Paris explains, “it alludes to the figure that doesn’t make itself small in the eyes of others, [that doesn’t try] to make others feel comfortable. When you meet us, we might come across as very sensitive and demure. Because we’re from Minnesota, we’re nice. But it’s important for us in our artistic expression to not shrink ourselves. An important part of it was also us emerging as three young women. Even today, people are like: ‘Oh, who plays piano on your album? Who produces you?’ And it’s a strong statement to be able to say: ‘We did everything.’ This is called King for a reason.”
Alongside “mediums of love”, as Amber describes the songs on We Are King, sits The Greatest, an irresistibly buoyant salute to Muhammad Ali. “We were watching old interviews with him while we were writing the song and the stuff he was talking about is still very prevalent in society,” Paris says, her tone now less upbeat. “It’s heartbreaking but also inspiring. He had everything at his doorstep but he was willing to say, ‘If I’m not going to be treated equally with my fellow Americans, then you can take it all back.’ He took his celebrity and used it for the agenda of equality and that’s the biggest reason we made a song about Muhammad Ali. The motivation behind the song was to say, ‘You’re great. You’re unapologetically great, without a reason. Don’t be afraid to say that you’re great.’”
Now the big-name admirers are lining up at the trio’s door once again. Stevie Wonder turned up to their last LA show in February and asked to go backstage to meet them. “We just hit it off really well,” Paris recalls. As a result they’ve ended up on the bill supporting Wonder when he plays London’s Hyde Park in July. It’s clearly an honour but one King feel they have waited long enough for. “When we made the EP, we jokingly said to ourselves: This is a calling card for Stevie Wonder. This is a note saying, ‘Call us!’” She laughs softly: “Five years later…”
We Are King is out now via King Creative and on vinyl on Friday 27 May
