kwn: Pure Feeling
On Valentine’s Day 2025, kwn dropped her breakout hit – a remix of worst behaviour that sent the internet into a tailspin. What followed was a whirlwind year that transformed her life overnight. As her star continues to rise and her fanbase grows increasingly devoted, the Walthamstow-born R&B star is learning how to evolve while staying true to herself.
“I’ve learned a lot about myself within the past year,” kwn says slowly, with a light frown, still seeming to process it all. “A lot has happened in my life.” No doubt. It’s been a slingshot ride through the agonies and ecstasies of the fame machine for the 26-year-old singer and producer: a viral video drawing in millions of obsessive fans mapping her every move, gossipy guesswork about her romantic relationships and, almost inevitably, parasocial TikTok teardowns anticipating their collapse in the internet’s rapid half-life. “Once you get to a certain stage, it’s like everyone feels they’re entitled to know everything about your life,” she explains over Zoom with a rueful smile. Against butter-yellow walls, she’s dressed in a black ribbed shirt, a tattooed flower stem blooming from her neck when she gazes up in thought, its petals tucked beneath a beanie pulled low. “It’s definitely hard to adjust to.”
Following her breakout hit – a remix of worst behaviour featuring Kehlani, released on Valentine’s Day 2025 and sealed with a decidedly steamy music video kiss – the internet has been hooked on kwn’s sultry, sapphic take on R&B. The major label EP that followed four months later, with all due respect, cemented her arrival, garnering hundreds of millions of views and streams and landing her nominations at the Brits, Mobos and BET Awards. But it took cycles of making, breaking and remoulding for kwn to get here. Named K Wilson, the Walthamstow-born-and-bred crooner first began dropping songs in 2020 as k1, before changing the spelling (but not the pronunciation) to the first and last letters of her names to avoid being mistaken for a drill rapper. It was only after being signed, and then dropped, that she would find her sonic groove – and a thirsty fandom. But her new heartthrob status brings heightened interest in her love life and sleuthing for the subject of her songs with it, along with the headache of online drama, much to kwn’s chagrin.
But all the complex feelings her new life inspires are being channelled into an upcoming (third) EP. “I’ve been able to have a conversation with myself in this music now… rather than just bottling my feelings up and putting it to the back of my brain.” It’s a project that has already been transformative for her, pushing her to sing with more openness and honesty than she had ever previously allowed herself to. “Ninety percent is just exactly what I’m feeling, thinking, going through – I’m only learning to do that now.” Over video call, she reads as down-to-earth, kind-hearted and laid-back, but boundaried, in a learned, self-protective way. An introvert used to repressing her emotions, she says, “people around me have brought me out of my shell, and that taught me it’s OK to speak out. It’s OK to feel the way you feel. I’m a closed-off person as it is… but now I’m like, no, let me put this into words and use the music as my journal.” The result has “almost been like a one-to-one therapy session with myself”. It’s also a push against the dose of dehumanisation that comes with becoming a public figure. “It will let people know I’m actually just a human being and have the same feelings and emotions as everyone else, you know?”
“I’ve been able to have a conversation with myself in this music now… rather than just bottling my feelings up and putting it to the back of my brain”
She sees the new release, titled and all pride aside, as a B-side to with all due respect, completing the sentence the previous record began. Its creation has been a completely different process for kwn, who produced only a couple of its tracks, as opposed to almost all of her past releases. Back then, creating the songs on her last EP, “I had so much time. I was in my room every day making music and wasn’t really thinking about making a project. This side has been more pressure.” But recording in a more unguarded way – snatching moments in the studio between a busy schedule of international tours, award shows and festival appearances – has led to “a lot more different feelings… because I’m able to really speak about what I’m going through at that present moment”. If her earlier releases were intimate – raunchy R&B full of longing for lovers or the life of her dreams – this EP dives a level deeper. The sensual slow jams remain, but alongside a new vulnerability that lays bare many of her fears, insecurities and grief. She sings about the death of her grandfather. Feeling unlovable. Not wanting anyone except the person pushing you away.
When kwn talks about a “big release”, she means emotionally. That’s also how she describes lord i’ve tried, the 2024 song that saved her. People regularly tell her it saved them too. “I always say that song is like a prayer to me.” Infused with a gospel sensibility, supported by a choir, she pleads for the help of a higher power. “I wrote that in one of the darkest times of my life. I didn’t think life was gonna get any better.” In mid-2024, after being dropped by Black Butter, she was stuck working a “super tiring job” delivering for Amazon. “I had no time to make music. Every time I did try, I was just so shattered. I couldn’t get anything out of my head.” She was broke. No labels would offer an advance. “I was doubting myself and my abilities to take my music to the place I wanted to take it to.” When she recorded it spontaneously after trying and failing to make a happy song, she wept. Now, when she performs the song on her headline tours to crowds of more than 2,000 people, she cries for a different reason: “I can’t believe my life. I can’t believe I got out of that dark tunnel I was in.” Its uncertainty has turned into faith. “I think I’m building a relationship with God now,” she says. “I always pray before I go on stage.”
In the years prior, kwn was still finding her voice. A fan of Ty Dolla $ign and PartyNextDoor, she experimented with a similar rap-singing hybrid, “which I let go quite quickly, thankfully”. Then, influenced by the peak of Afroswing, she dabbled in that trend too. But she eventually came back to the music that moulded her: traditional R&B. “It’s music I grew up on, music that I love.” She thought, “let me just give it a go… I’ve just been rocking with it ever since.” kwn makes the kind of yearning, dancing-in-the-rain casanova R&B that taps straight into the genre’s 90s and 2000s American roots. The freaky anthems glide over textured, funky beats, her smooth vocals edged with a futuristic electronic bite. Still, the classic sound sets her apart in the UK, where the current flows towards alternative R&B – usually more spare, subversive or mixed with other genres. As a result, much of her most rabid fanbase is based stateside, in its homeland, where kwn momentarily considered moving. But: “I’m just so back and forth from everywhere that any downtime I get, I don’t actually want to be in LA. I just want to be home with my family.”
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She credits them for her taste. “This was a very R&B house, thanks to my sisters.” One had Brandy on her walls, the other was obsessed with Beyoncé. kwn was into “all the boy groups: Jagged Edge, Boyz II Men, all those type of guys,” she recalls. “I’ve always been so fascinated by how it made me feel. I think it’s the best genre, selfishly. When I realised I can put a newer spin on traditional R&B, I was like, why not?” The blend of her Auto-Tuned vocals – “a controversial topic” for the genre’s most stringent purists – and raw, untouched background vocals add a modern twist to the nostalgic sound. As well as the fact that, other than maybe Syd from The Internet, with her cropped hair, full-body ink and taste for tailoring, she might be the only stud making waves in the genre. kwn often shuts down red carpets in clean, contemporary updates on dapper suiting – think leather jacket and pleated trousers with a shirt and tie, or bleached denim-effect blazer and slacks – and rocks New Era fitted caps, boxy tees and trackies in her day-to-day.
In the summer of 2024, she found a kindred spirit in Kehlani, a fellow face-tatted, K-initialled, queer R&B songstress. First meeting at her CRASH album release party, she later jumped on kwn’s worst behaviour – and the visceral electricity in their music video launched a thousand takes. She hides a grin at its mention. “That just spun the internet so hard.” Thirty-one million YouTube views later, the speculation around their relationship soured, fuelled by rumours she had to shut down with a video. It was a lesson in the fickleness of fan love, but her real-life relationships have been a guiding light through the rockiness. “It was either Destin [Conrad] or Kehlani who said, ‘No matter what happens now, people are in your business, whether you like it or not. Your life will never be the same again.’ Which is scary, but it’s just something you have to deal with,” she recounts, gesticulating with her hands. “Protect your heart. Protect your peace. Keep as much as you can private.”
Outside of the noise, “it’s such an organic and easy natural process, making music with [Kehlani]. We tend to have the same ideas and go to the same notes in a melody,” she says. “I’m sure there will be more music made in the future for me and her.” She has been foundational in kwn’s career upswing, with Kehlani taking her on her first-ever tour, as a supporting artist. “When I did K’s tour, the first row knew me and that was it; I’m singing songs and no one’s singing them with me. But now I have a room full of 2,000 people singing my songs back to me, which is insane,” she says with a smile, of her headline world tour, which reportedly sold out in half an hour. “Every time I get on that stage, all my problems, worries, tiredness – everything just leaves my body.”
How would she characterise the typical kwn fan? “Feral,” she laughs. “They are a handful.” In the crowd, women often hold up their phone numbers, or write messages inspired by her lyrics, like, “I’ll do what you say.” They’re possessive over her, at times going so far as to shun straight men in the crowd. “I’m so happy the room is full of queer people and they can feel safe in a room like that… but to make other people feel like they shouldn’t be there, it’s out of order and I just don’t really agree with it.” While she’s happy to be able to provide representation, “I’m a woman who likes women at the end of the day, and that’s really all there is to it. I don’t see me as any different to anybody else,” she explains. “I don’t mind when other people put a label on me – that doesn’t bother me. But me myself, I wouldn’t go around and be like, ‘Hey, guys, I’m a lesbian, just if you didn’t know!’”
She feels lucky to have never had her sexuality or presentation become a struggle. “I have a super supportive family who never judged me for that and let me be me, so I’ve never really thought about it,” she says, recalling a childhood in which she didn’t particularly identify with feminine toys or traits, and it not being an issue. “That’s why I don’t do the label thing because I’ve known that about myself for so long now. I’m just me. K is K,” she says, this time referring to herself by the initial. She’s incredibly close to her kin, speaking to Crack the day before she whisks her family away to Jamaica on holiday. “We don’t really have that much extended family, so it was really just us. We’re very tight-knit.”
Both her parents are British-born, her father Nigerian, her mother white English. “Thankfully and fortunately, my mum and dad worked super hard to make sure that me and my sisters didn’t go without, even if it meant they went without. They made sure we didn’t see the struggles behind the scenes. I had a really good upbringing and childhood.” But growing up in Walthamstow, east London, “forced me to work hard and get myself out of the environment I was in”. When kwn was 16, “I lost one of my really close friends to a stabbing.” It was a sombre wake-up call to a life she was wasting, “hanging around the wrong types of people”, as she now sees. “I was smoking and doing stupidness at a young age and making my family upset, disappointing my mum and my dad and my sisters.” She made a decision to change her life: “I don’t want to be around this any more.”
Once she joined the creative academy East London Arts and Music (ELAM), she understood: “This is where I’m meant to be. Everyone has a goal. Everyone is so ambitious. Everyone’s so talented. Being around so many like-minded people just completely flipped the switch in my brain.” It’s clear she could have taken her talents in many directions. As a footballer for Leyton Orient Girls while in school, she was offered a four-year scholarship in Canada at around age 12 or 13, with the prospect of a professional career, but she turned it down, not ready to commit. “A few years down the line, I got dropped from Leyton Orient. I think I was too aggressive on the pitch; I always wanted to play with the boys, but obviously couldn’t.” Then, after college, a year before the pandemic, she joined her father, then executive head chef at The Ivy, to work at the acclaimed restaurant on small prep jobs, before being encouraged into its high-pressure pastry plating, which she thrived in. But when Covid hit, her father told her, “‘I can’t keep you on and not the people that genuinely want to be chefs and have a passion for this,’ which I completely understood and respected,” she explains via text later. “If I didn’t continue with music, maybe I would’ve stayed working in restaurants. Who knows?
The idiosyncrasies of her journey, so full of stops, starts and tangents, might be why kwn’s dreams centre around living in, or heightening, the moment, rather than trying to dictate stringent terms for her future. Just as her joys sound graciously humble – right now, the success of her music, she praises, “allows me not to go back to Amazon again” – her goals are grounded in the everyday gratitude she has for a life that allows her to look after herself and her family while creating art she adores. “I don’t ever want to lose the love I have for this music. I still want the excitement every time I put out a song or project. I still want to get butterflies just before I go on stage. I never want that to end,” she says. “I can only pray that things just get bigger and better from here.” It worked the last time.
and all pride aside is out 26 June on RCA
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