LE BOOK sits with Kalika

Kalika, The Disenchanted Princess

It's just past 4pm when Kalika sits down, iced coffee in hand, a fluorescent yellow necklace around her neck, the color she's ended up adopting as a signature, almost in spite of herself. The café is unassuming, a few minutes from her label's office. She has just released her second album, Ma Claque. She carries a distinct energy through the whole conversation: blunt, warm, fully present.

Asked how she'd describe herself to someone who had never heard of Kalika – without naming herself, her job, or a single one of her songs – she improvised an answer that sums up what she does better than any biography could: "I turn my existential crises into material we can think through together." Then, more simply: "I try to put words to things everyone feels but nobody dares say."

Becoming Kalika

Before it was a music project, Kalika was a survival mechanism. The character was born in Paris, during a period the artist whose real name is Mia describes as one of extreme depersonalization: a form of dissociation so severe she stopped recognizing herself in the mirror. "It was violent," she says. Writing and composing became the only way to stay tethered to her memory. "It showed me I was still there, because these were my stories so that was me."

That founding gesture blurred the line between artist and person for years: "For the whole start of my career, I was convinced there was no difference between Kalika and Mia." It took a second album, a break, a trip to Japan, for her to recognize how tangled that relationship had become and to start deliberately untangling it: "Now I want Kalika to feed Mia. Kalika gives me courage in everyday life so she stays a real person and not just a character." Out of that story comes a principle she keeps returning to: never disown an earlier version of herself. "We all have several selves over a lifetime... It's a bit like old tattoos you find ugly. I'm not really on team cover-it-up or erase-it." Finding your style, she says, can take "a whole lifetime" and it's precisely that visible, fumbling process that draws her to other artists.

Writing as a question of dosage

One song on Ma Claque occupies a special place: "Off," whose lyrics date back to her first album, Adieu les monstres, but which she says she could never have finished and released back then held back by fear of judgment. "Now I say whatever I want... I genuinely don't care anymore, I say everything. And it feels so good."

Still, not everything makes it into a song. Asked what part of herself she has never managed to turn into music, she describes a necessary sense of dosage: "There are things that are too intimate... I can't cross a certain line, or it messes me up. Instead of being cathartic, it does the opposite – you just feel completely exposed." She recently discovered that this caution needs to extend beyond the song itself. The video for "Crazy," too personal and released, she feels, before she was ready, left her badly shaken: "I had the feeling the universe was telling me no, this wasn't the moment." From that experience she draws a rule she now applies to everything: a photo, a feature, an image – not just to music. As for the song that took the most courage to finish, she names "Sarah et Stéphane" without hesitation, a track about her parents that she says she wrote in one sitting, after carrying it unwritten for eight years: "Sometimes it's not so much the moment you sit down to write, it's everything that happens before, that grows in you, until you can finally say it." When a song stops belonging to her, she has a clear answer: "It stops being mine when people come up to me and tell me their own stories about the song... That's when I know it's no longer mine, it belongs to their stories now."

Yellow, synesthesia, and the fear of reference

Kalika treats sound and image as inseparable, a synesthesia she says she's had forever, pairing one or two colors with every new musical world. For Ma Claque, that color is yellow: "An acidic, biological, aggressive yellow," chosen precisely for its ambivalence. "There's something deceptive about yellow. You'd say sunshine, good vibes. But I wanted a very strong contrast" between an outwardly joyful surface and an energy that's very dark, morbid and goth. The album's visual world is built almost entirely in black and white, punctuated with neon flashes, a reflection of a world she currently experiences as uniformly grey, occasionally rescued by bursts of aggressive color.

To build her moodboards, she says she long preferred drawing over gathering references: "Because when you take in too many references, you tend to end up locked into the current moment... and make something that isn't timeless at all." She draws instead from childhood and family memories material she considers harder to lose to passing trends. Her relationship to image, though, stays ambivalent. Deeply visual by nature, she treats the visual world as inseparable from her music but resents the pace the industry now demands, which no longer allows image to be crafted with the same care as sound. "Image used to matter a lot too, but people took the time to do it properly... Now you have to produce images every single day." She names that pressure, alongside social media, as one of the biggest threats to artists' mental health today.

Social media, the industry, and the word "salesperson”

Here Kalika doesn't soften her language. She credits social platforms with a real democratizing power as a way for artists outside privileged circles to get discovered without money but describes her own relationship to them as fluctuating, sometimes genuinely enjoyable, sometimes reduced to pure obligation: "I try to see it as a job. I don't see it as art." She's precise about when the industry shifted: "Three years ago you could still break through with the right media... Now labels won't take a real chance on you unless you've already popped off online, or you're somebody's son or daughter." Faced with that constant pressure to perform online, she says she's tried to set herself one rule: only post when it's fun, artistic, or political.  Otherwise, she’d risk losing her taste for the job altogether. "Being an artist has just become being a salesperson."

The stage as a place to come back into her body

If the studio is a space for searching, the stage is where Kalika says she feels fully herself a preference she ties directly to her dissociative episodes: "The stage is the moment I get to be embodied again... playing a fully dissociated show is genuinely horrible." Rehearsing alone before a concert becomes an almost therapeutic exercise, a way of reconnecting with her own body. After a year and a half without touring, following more than three years of nonstop shows, she's now back with a new live arrangement under real time pressure, squeezed between the album's release and the first tour dates: "There's a very raw, very frontal energy to this live show... something very club, angry, dark." Her ambition for the new show: recreate the feeling of a carnival ride, a horror-movie funfair. The tour already counts around thirty dates, which she hopes to push past sixty, and is set to culminate at the iconic Olympia in Paris. On her relationship with her audience, she admits to an almost excessive warmth she's had to learn to rein in on stage: "I love them so much... I don't want to be the kind of artist who acts like a god on stage, because that creates distance between the artist and the crowd." 

The references that shape her

Asked which song she wishes she'd written, Kalika names "Bitch" by Allie X without hesitation "the perfect song," in her words: "angry, fun, deep," with an incredible top-line and an aggressive mix. She also cites the electro duo Sleigh Bells, whose energy directly fed the making of the album. Madonna's most recent album comes up too, alongside a broader reflection on how the industry still punishes women who claim a radical sexuality, no matter their status: "It's never enough, no matter what, even when you're perfect." On film, she cites Emir Kusturica's Underground, whose wedding scene the bride hoisted onto a cart in the middle of a war directly inspired the visual world of her EP J’ai pleuré. She also defends The Substance, embracing its discomfort head-on: "That film is a statement the industry needed to hear." As for her favorite album cover, she doesn't hesitate long: Crystal Castles' Baptism, an image she calls genuinely iconic, and one she still returns to among all their artwork.

A kind of beauty that unsettles

Underneath the whole conversation runs a very personal idea of beauty. Kalika champions an aesthetic of imperfect smudged makeup paired with an unfinished gesture that still carries intent over anything too polished, too done. "That imperfect thing, with real intention behind it... that moves me more than something clean." She sums up her own ambition in one line: she wants to be beautiful, but on her own terms "beautiful in a way that's a little frightening." Asked what she'd keep if someone stole her entire catalogue, she refuses to pin down one answer, calling herself too changeable to fix anything in time. For years, her answer would have been "L'été est mort," her very first single, for how clearly it already carried all her influences. Today, she's torn between that founding song and "Ma Claque" which has almost entirely become a lifestyle: "I'll always be a little pissed-off girl who's had enough  no matter what story I end up telling myself later." There is no fixed portrait of Kalika, and she seems to prefer it that way. Every answer she gives comes wrapped in the same disclaimer: this is true today, ask me again tomorrow. It's tempting to read that as evasiveness. It isn't. It's the same instinct that built the character in the first place – a refusal to let any single version of herself calcify into the only one. Kalika was born out of a need to prove, to herself, that she was still there. Everything since has been a way of staying that way: contradictory, unfinished, allergic to anything too clean.

Ma Claque isn't a resolution. It's a mantra for staying unresolved, sung loud enough that it starts to sound like a plan. Whatever Kalika becomes next, she's already told us not to expect her to stay the same.