Q&A: KTJ & Carly Are Bringing Existentialism Into Pop
TWIN SISTERS KTJ & CARLY — came into their shared love of music early in life, first during family living room jam seshes. Fast forward a decade or so later, and the duo boasts an impressive discography of catchy yet introspective, cinematic pop tracks.
Exploring existential ideas of ego and identity through their music, the duo jokes that they often view their writing sessions as a form of therapy. The sisters frequently delve into coming-of-age narratives, and many of their songs process the transitionary period from your teenage years into adulthood.
Their latest release, “Sundays,” tackles what it feels like to go from a “Sunday kind of love” to “Sunday scaries.” The track is a soft, aching ode to coming back to yourself after a breakup, confronting the often uncomfortable emotions that arise because of this. Holding feelings of loss and release simultaneously, and learning to hold space for both.
With a new LP in the works and plans to experiment even more with their sound, KTJ & Carly are ones to watch in 2024. Read on below to hear more about the talented duo.
LUNA: Tell me about your background in music and how your group came together.
CARLY: We're identical twins, so we literally have been attached at the hip since the moment we came into the world. We always sang and did music together, but it was never really something that we had pursued as a career. Then we got into acting and started doing that for a while, and then when we graduated high school we met our manager, who [told us] we should try and develop an artist project and really go for it. We were like, “Okay, yeah,” so we moved to LA in 2019, right before the pandemic, to just try it out. We've been having such a great time, and it's been a wonderful journey. We're really lucky to have each other because we're super close — we're best friends.
KATIE: Yeah, we were always just drawn to music and knew we were gonna do something with it, we just never really put it together. We were always singing, making music together. My freshman year of high school we started producing just for fun, and then when we met our manager she helped with the business side and helped create it.
LUNA: Would you say that your childhood influenced your music?
CARLY: 100%. My dad is super into R&B and classic rock, and I feel like growing up with that definitely influenced the way we sing and the music we listen to and make. He was in a band, too, actually, when he was our age, and so music was always really important to him. My mom's dad, my granddad, was also in a band growing up. And so while they didn't pursue that as their career, they always carried it with them, which I think is really cool about music — you don't have to necessarily pursue it as a career to have it in your life.
We have so many memories of us gathered around as a family jamming out, like my dad's playing guitar and my mom's in the corner with a tambourine and Katie's on the piano or singing, I'm playing violin or something. Our family is very supportive of us, and we're super grateful for that.
LUNA: Do you have any other prominent musical influences?
CARLY: We both have similar ones, and they kind of come together. It's almost like that's what makes us our band. When we first started, I was really inspired by BANKS. I just really like how she doesn't really stay in one box — she just does whatever sounds good. I really appreciate that because I hate being boxed into something — we like experimenting with our music. Also PVRIS, I've been listening to them a lot, and I've been really inspired by Tom Odell.
KATIE: Mine are constantly changing. Tying into your last question, growing up I would listen to Alicia Keys, Taylor Swift, Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, Britney Spears — the 2008 pop core. As I’ve grown, I feel like I love listening to those songs because they just feel so nostalgic to me. I feel like music can put me in a place that brings back [memories] or is a way to get to my inner child in a way.
LUNA: I noticed that you have a lot of range and variety as far as genre. I'd love to hear more about your experimentation with sound.
CARLY: Yeah, we like to switch it up. Like [our song] “Daddy's Little Lawyer,” for example, is very rock influenced, and then “Sundays,” the song we just released, is very indie folk/singer-songwriter. I feel like when we’re writing, it's usually about the subgenres we're currently being inspired by or what we're listening to. When we were writing “Daddy's Little Lawyer,” we were very much into this rock kind of scene and [were] listening to that kind of music. But we always try to keep the whole thing pop at the end of the day, and the little subgenres in there are usually just whatever inspires us at the time of writing.
But lately, the stuff that we've been writing now has been very experimental and left of center. It's very cinematic — I feel like we've been really inspired by stuff that moves cinematically. That's the best way I can describe it.
KATIE: As far as going forward, I want to explore more left of center, R&B, and the cinematic [sound]. I think every time we write a song we take a little bit of its core with us to the next song, so it's almost like our own music is inspiring us. We try not to keep ourselves too boxed in but always make it our sound. So who knows what the next song will sound like?
LUNA: Would you say that cinematic quality translates into your visuals as well?
KATIE: As far as visuals go, that's really important to us. As we're writing, we’ll be like, “That would be so cool if we did this in the music video!”
CARLY: It's so funny, when we're writing Katie will just pop out with ideas, and it's always about the music video or what kind of thing we're going to make alongside it. So when we're writing, we're simultaneously thinking about the whole picture. We had a session right before this, and as we were doing it I was on Pinterest putting together the visuals that work with the song, [figuring out] the vibe of the song. Like, what kind of emotion is this invoking to people? That's equally important as the quality of the song. I feel like it's a whole immersive experience — that's why Taylor Swift to me is so amazing, because she has the whole package. It's not just releasing a song, she has easter eggs and she has music videos and cool things that help the fans interact.
LUNA: What’s your collaborative process like when creating new music?
KATIE: Sometimes we'll do Zoom writing sessions. That was a great thing that came from the pandemic, that we were able to connect with people from anywhere in the world. We'll just hang out and talk for however long, and all of a sudden a song will start to form itself based on what the vibe is, usually just whatever mood we're in.
CARLY: It's almost like a little therapy session — we just talk about what's going on in our lives. Usually we come up with the concept first, unless there's some sort of production that we had worked on. Then we start writing after we've come up with a concept. When it's just us two writing, it’s chaos every time. It's usually better when we have a structured thing.
KATIE: Sometimes it starts from a visual and we'll be inspired by that. Or a chord progression, melody, lyric, or concept.
CARLY: We always like to work on things [separately] if we have our own ideas, and then we bring them together and combine our ideas. I'll literally be asleep sometimes and I'll wake up in the middle of the night with a cool idea and record it half asleep. Then I bring it the next day and we listen to it and Katie's like, “What the hell was that?” Or it's really good and we do something with it. A few of our songs that we have out there [came from] half-asleep recordings.
LUNA: What’s it like working with your sibling?
KATIE: I think there's two sides of the coin. While it can be a lot harder than working with a bandmate you're not related to, it's more efficient, almost. As siblings, we're brutally honest with each other and that can lead to fighting, but at the end of the day we don't have to tiptoe around each other.
CARLY: I think that there's kind of an efficiency with being with each other in this because we know each other so well that we know the way our brains work. We are so close, it's almost intuitive. It's easier to get in fights with each other because we're siblings, but I think at the end of the day it's way better. I would not want to do this with anybody else. I just feel really lucky to be with my sister.
LUNA: Tell me about the process behind your newest single, “Sundays.”
KATIE: We had a few Sundays where we just had insane anxiety, and we both experienced it together, so I said we should write a song about the Sunday scaries. In rom-coms, it's always about the Sunday love, so we were like, “What if we wrote a song about the Sunday scaries?” It's like, you had this Sunday love, and then you don't have it anymore, and you're just heartbroken and the Sunday scaries are back. That's how we were inspired.
CARLY: So we went into the session with Zane Carney, who wrote the song with us — he's a super talented guitar player, great musician. When we went in, everyone had just gotten out of a relationship or something at the time, if I remember correctly, and we were all kind of feeling that. We were just talking about our lives, and then we also had this idea about the Sunday scaries. So we were like, why don't we just merge them. You lose somebody really important to you and have to deal with your own inner battles and how to finally experience these things that are hard on your own. Because I feel like when you're in a relationship with somebody, it's easy to get dependent on someone. So “Sundays” would be an example of some sort of dependency that you need, like “Sundays” is my anxiety, and that person made my anxiety go away, but then they're gone, and now my anxiety is back. It’s like, I have to figure out how to get rid of this on my own before I bring somebody else into the mix. So that was kind of our headspace when we wrote it.
LUNA: Do you have any prominent themes that come up a lot in your songs lyrically?
CARLY: We had two EPs before our last one, called Identity and Ego Death. I think a lot of our music is centered around identity and the ego and the subconscious, the collective consciousness — things about your inner self that everybody kind of feels too.
KATIE: I think it's important to always ask questions and ask why. I remember in high school, one of our theater directors said that one of the main points of theater and music and acting is to make people think differently by the end of it. So they're asking questions like “Why am I stuck in this job I hate?” or “Why am I in this relationship [that] no longer [serves] me?” or “What can I do to have more fun?” or, you know, XYZ? I feel like that's like a big inspiration in our writing.
LUNA: It’s almost 2024! Do you have any goals going forward this year?
CARLY: We're currently working on an LP right now, [which] we're really excited about. It has some of our favorite songs we've ever written. There’s a lot of the big themes about being in your twenties and figuring out how to live life as an adult when you're not really an adult yet, and you're trying to figure out where you stand in society. It's been super fun and it's a really cool sound, so I'm excited to get that out. We have a lot of goals — we really want to go on tour again, see more of the country and perform music.
KATIE: We always tell ourselves not to limit ourselves. We did that with our short film that we just came out with. We were like, we want to fall from the sky. We don't have any budget, but we're gonna figure it out, and that's what we did. Is it top tier special effects? No, but we just don't want to box ourselves in. So I think this upcoming year, a big goal of ours is to really go beyond the sky. The sky is not the limit — we can go farther. I think we're really excited to create and share this new stuff we have coming out and it's gonna be a good year — I can feel it.
