Ashnikko on Weedkiller: "I find screaming much more effective than violence"

Ashnikko showed up to last month’s Brit Awards covered in boils.

The creepy getup was skin-tight, translucent latex wrapped around her body like an alien membrane while egg sacs (her offspring) scattered down her back and hips like tumors. The outfit was tied together with her iconic blue hair cut into a bob, wet and draped down.

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This was the first fans had heard from Ashnikko in about a year. Following the viral success of her 2020 track “Daisy” and 2021 mixtape, Demidevil, the agent of chaos took some time for themself. Now, they’re back in the strangest way possible. “The girls that get it, get it,” the singer-songwriter smiles over Zoom. 

The era begins with their latest single, “You Make Me Sick!,” an aggravated expulsion of a deadbeat-shaped toxin from the body. The entire track is at the top of Ashnikko’s lungs, an exhilarating reclamation of bodily autonomy, something the 27-year-old didn’t have “in a few romantic relationships and also as a child. It was good to create my own personal rage room to break plates.”

“Screaming,” they reflect, “I find it much more effective than violence.”

Sorry, trypophobes: The music video plays with the same visual themes from Ashnikko’s red carpet look. “I think I have the opposite of trypophobia. I have trypophelia. I love little growths and holes and coral and barnacles and blackheads and pus. Maybe not pus, actually. I take back pus, but growths! I’m really obsessed with fractals and geometry and nature. It all tied into my love for that.” 

The point of having a body, Ashnikko believes, is to use it as a canvas. Or perhaps as a portal. And with the announcement of her debut studio album, Weedkiller (due June 2), she’s ready to dive in and get a little messy. “I’m using the fantastical world as a medium to tell a very personal story.”

Weedkiller is, they explain, a concept album set in the wreckage of a destroyed civilization. Ashnikko is a surviving faerie, and “the weedkiller itself is an enemy with many faces,” a killer machine that “represents an ecological collapse and an ecological enemy. It represents my rapist. It represents the heartbreak that I felt as a child. I’ve put all of these enemies’ faces on this one fantastical robot enemy called the weed killer, this biomatter-eating robot, because all it does is consume with no remorse.” A great ecological metaphor for environmental destruction, she says.  

Enter “Worms.” The music video for their latest single drops us directly into a Mad-Max-meets-Bjork’s “Army Of Me” apocalyptic universe. A mini-Ashnikko imprisoned behind the teeth of a monster head dips in and out of chaos and choreography alongside hell-bound demons while the life-size one drives a teeth-lined monster truck.

It’s a nihilistic feast of the senses. “I’m in complete denial that the world has ended and that I’m alone in this world.” Nothing matters, she tells herself. “Everything’s fine. I’m riding through the desert with a sword on my back in a monster truck, and I want to go fast.” But there’s a seed of grief, too.

The album explores various catharses, and Ashnikko oscillates between screaming at the top of her lungs and seductive siren calls. It’s a 13-song roller coaster ride between emotions and genres featuring two collaborations: Daniela Lalita joins “Super Soaker,” and Ethel Cain is featured on the devastatingly beautiful track “Dying Star.”

Their recording session for the latter was one of their favorites, Ashnikko says. “A huge thing for me on this album is to only work with people that make me feel joyful and comfortable.” She’s done the “100 million pop sessions” with hit songwriters and Billboard Hot 100 makers. Now, she knows what she prioritizes in collaborators. “I feel like I’m incredibly sensitive to someone who’s not funny. If someone has a bad sense of humor, I don’t think I can make music with them. I’ve done the pop circuit; it didn’t work for me.”

The song with Cain, undeniably, and perhaps surprisingly to some, works. Ashnikko fell in love with the “American Teenager” singer after seeing her perform at the Hollywood Cemetery (how fitting?). “She makes you feel hollow but in a good way. When I listen to her music, I feel the sublime. I feel small but in a very safe way, like a speck of dust in the universe.”

“Dying Star” is a Greek tragedy of a song about leaving an abusive relationship behind for something soft and welcoming, set in Ashnikko’s fantasy world. An intergalactic traveler leaves a dying planet “in search of a new one because their planet is dead, or it has been attacked, or it’s overrun with weeds or an invasive species. It’s not suitable for life anymore, so they are on the search for a planet to take them in.” 

It’s a softer side we haven’t seen much from Ashnikko, and they’re excited to reveal more and more bits of herself. They’ve been romantically linked to fellow singer-songwriter Arlo Parks, and Ashnikko says their relationship inspired these “joyful, sexy, loving songs that feel like I’m getting just as much as I’m giving.” 

And as Ashnikko explores their gender identity, gone are the songs about stupid boys and sass pancakes. “Maybe in the past, my music has been a little girl boss,” they reflect, mulling over old feelings of embarrassment and anger for some of their previous eras, “but now,” she says, “I’ve circled back around, and I have a lot of love for my younger self. It just felt like more of a caricature and more fantastical. I know that this album is very fantastical, but I feel as though I am speaking from a more personal place. All my references and inspirations are coming out in this album. It’s a culmination of everything that has taught me how to make music and how to make visual art.”

They pick their words carefully as we wade into the realm of gender, much more protective over how they speak about their identity than music. “I’m from an incredibly conservative, super homophobic patriarchal place in North Carolina [where] my surroundings and immediate family reflected those views. It wasn’t an incredibly free space for me to explore anything to do with my sexual orientation or my gender identity. I didn’t even know that being nonbinary was an option until I was 18.”

It was constraining, and Ashnikko doesn’t like being boxed in. They recently updated their pronouns to she/they on Instagram. “I identify with womanhood, but I feel more than that. I’m still trying to figure that out,” she explains. 

But don’t get her wrong. There are still some tracks for the girls — especially the queer ones. “Gooey like a gusher/Tony Hawk, I’m doing tricks until my tongue hurt,”  she sings in “Don’t Look At It.” “Oouie, in the gutter/I can’t help that I want to be titty smothered.” Ashnikko played that song for her mom. “She was just like, deep sigh, ‘Jesus Christ.’” Ashnikko laughs, “I know I won there.”

No one else is putting out music like this: That’s what makes Ashnikko so exciting. It’s dangerous yet laced with bubblegum. It’s sexy with a razor-sharp edge. It’s punk and metal, but also pop and screamo and trap. It’s all of them but also none of the above?

“I don’t even know what genre I would put this album in,” she admits. It makes sense. After all, their influences include Bjork, M.I.A., Gwen Stefani, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott, Paramore, and Kelis. “All of those artists have not been confined to one genre,” they say. “Kelis was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna scream on this song, and y’all are going to deal with it.’ Nicki Minaj was like, ‘I’m going to write a complete pop song, and y’all are going to deal with it.’” 

So, now, Ashnikko’s brewing up a pop-metal-rap-emo album that will be chaotic, silly, tragic, empowering, angry and beautiful — and the world’s just going to have to deal with it.