KUČKA’s digital world: “I can write music from anyone’s perspective – even someone created from my imagination”Laura Lowther’s voice has been heard by millions. Better known to the world as KUČKA, the UK-born, Australian-raised, and now America-based songstress burst onto the scene in 2013 with an appearance on A$AP Rocky’s seminal debut album, Long. Live. ASAP. Since then, her glassy vocals has been heard on some of the biggest and most influential electronic tracks of the past decade, including collaborations with the likes of Flume, SOPHIE, Machinedrum and Mount Kimbie.

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High-profile collaborations and guest slots initially grabbed fans’ attention, but it’s Lowther’s own expertly-crafted electropop productions made them stick around.
“Emotional voyeurism,” she says with a smile. “That’s the technique I’ve been using to put everything together.” Lowther is speaking to us from a home studio nestled in a leafy suburb of L.A, and that ‘everything’ she’s referring to is her excellent sophomore album, Can You Hear Me Dreaming?.
KUČKA. Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
Serving a kaleidoscope of emotions, stories, and perspectives across twelve tracks, the album sees Lowther experimenting with new genres, styles, and collaborators, all while putting fantasy front and centre. “Being an emotional voyeur, I can write from anyone’s perspective – even someone created from my imagination.”
That’s a marked departure from her deeply introspective 2021 debut album, Wrestling, which eschewed any high-profile guest appearances in favour of emotional honesty and full artistic control.
“With Wrestling, I was really strict on myself,” she recalls of her debut album. “I didn’t want to include any songs that didn’t feel 100 per cent true to my own experience. I felt like it needed to be very personal.”
This time, however, she says the guiding principle was ‘no rules’.
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
“I wanted to really open up the process and have fun with it,” she says. “Thematically, I wasn’t restricted to my own personal stories, I wrote a lot with my wife and ended up with a bunch of tracks that I really liked. At a certain point, I realised ‘OK, this is an album’.”
Taking the concept of ‘emotional voyeurism’ to heart, Lowther says the album contains fragments of real-life stories paired with imagined fantasies, and all overlayed by images she’d find and add to a sprawling mood board. “I can kind of get bored of myself,” she laughs. “In real life, a story might end with you going to the supermarket and wrapping up your day, but when you get into that imaginative part of your brain there’s a million possibilities and the story can go anywhere.”
Album opener, Wasting Time (til the end of the world), dispenses with the here and now in favour of a near-future dystopia. Atop icy synth tones and snappy, minimalist beats, Lowther’s vocals pop in and out like morse code, telling a surprisingly upbeat story of love amidst an impending apocalypse.
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
“I used a lot of soft synths and keeping them sounding digital was really important,” Lowther says of the song’s production. “I feel like I’m surrounded by digital things constantly, and a lot of the things I was writing about were filtered through my computer in some way.”
A cornerstone of that digital aesthetic was the ’00s classic, BLUE II, from Rob Papen. “Back when I first started producing I actually had a cracked version of it,” she confesses with a laugh. “I always thought it sounded really cold – which was perfect for this album because I wanted the synths to be really crisp and digital.”
While Lowther’s home studio boasts its fair share of analogue gear, she says much of it is used during the writing, rather than the production, phase. “I have a couple of synths that I use to work out chord progressions and ideas,” she says. “My [Sequential] Prophet 600 gets used all the time because it just immediately sounds good and has a vibe – but it doesn’t necessarily make it onto the finished track. The only synth that I pretty much always use is Moog’s Slim Phatty. For certain bass tones, it’s just the best thing.”
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
A proudly digital production style helps unify the album’s twelve tracks, but, at the same time, these songs are defiantly eclectic. “From the beginning, I didn’t want any rules,” states Lowther. “And that really opened me up to pull from different genres, different ideas. I’d be listening to an industrial track and thinking ‘How are those drums made?’ or asking myself ‘What is it that I really love about this genre? How can I distil it into a four-bar loop?’”
The results of those experiments span everything from the sunny electro-pop of Cry, Cry, Cry, to the quasi-industrial grit of Gross Body, to the ’90s RnB inflected, Heavyweight.
“I used a Korg Electribe ER1 drum machine to write Heavyweight,” Lowther says of her recent single. “You can hear that the beats are quite different on that one. I found a groove and then resampled all the individual layers so that I could mess with it and bring it into the world of the album.”
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
Resampling is a core part of Lowther’s workflow. Rather than get stuck in old, familiar patterns, she says she’s always looking for the happy accidents that come when learning a new piece of software or hardware. “I’m always buying new plugins,” she admits. “Partly just so I can have that ‘huh, what does this do?’ feeling. I like to just mess around until it’s like ‘Oh shit! Resample that!’ Then, if I’m being disciplined, I’ll chop it up and put it into my sample pack folder in Ableton.”
Can You Hear Me Dreaming? may keep guest appearances to a minimum, but Lowther did choose to include a track made with her most frequent collaborator, Flume. “I was touring a lot with him when I was writing this record,’ she recalls when asked about their single, One More Night. “We had three or four days in New York and I was wandering around with that song in my head and I couldn’t work out where it had come from.” Initially, Lowther says she suspected it was someone else’s melody that she’d picked up – but, after digging through her computer she came up with an old demo recording.
“Turns out it was something I’d written for his last album, Palaces, and then we’d both totally forgotten about it. So, we were in a van driving to the show that night and I was playing him the demo on my phone going ‘we have to finish this song!’”
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
The song’s accompanying video sees Lowther take the part of a fictional cam girl as gyrating animations and retina-burning colour tones flash across the screen. “It was very ‘in the world’ of the lyrics,” Lowther says with a rueful smile. “We wanted to build out this fictional character and think about who she might be.”
As with all her recent music videos, One More Night was co-directed by Lowther’s wife, Dillon Howl. Since the release of 2021’s Wrestling, the pair have worked together closely, with Howl providing a visual identity for Lowther’s music. “She understands the project like no one else could,” says Lowther. “She’s been actively involved in the ideas and the writing process.”
Despite those years of collaboration, their first musical experiments came only recently – as part of a birthday wish. “I was asking what she wanted to do for her birthday,” Lowther recalls, “She was like, ‘I just want to write some music. Can we do that? Can you produce a song for me?’

“So, she was throwing words at me,” Lowther continues. “Sending me tracks she loves, types of beats. Then she sat there while I was producing and wrote out all of these lyrics on her phone, jumped on the mic and then did it all in one take. It was really free-flowing.”
Though that first song has yet to see the light of day, Howl’s vocals and lyrics can be heard on two tracks from Lowther’s new album. Credited as PESH, the songs – Communal Reverie, and Gross Body – hint at a fascinating new musical direction for Lowther. Underneath Howl’s hypnotic spoken-word delivery, Lowther’s production takes on a rough-edged distortion unlike anything we’ve heard from her before.
“She’s a really conceptual thinker,” Lowther says of her new musical comrade. “She’s got all these ideas that she describes in this extremely poetic way. It’s very inspiring, she’s always wanted to do a musical project centred around those ideas.”
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
When asked whether we can expect to hear from the newly established PESH, she quickly replies in the affirmative. “We have a PESH session today! We probably have six or seven songs that feel fairly finished at the moment. Half of them are a bit more dance-y, and a couple of them are just weird. It’s a bit all over the place, which is cool.”
Having established herself in a notoriously male-dominated industry, Lowther has had to push back on any number of gender-based stereotypes over her years in the music business. “It’s pretty jarring when people come up to talk to you and say ‘yeah, but who actually produced your track?’” she reflects. “I think for a while I got a bit of a chip on my shoulder from those experiences.”
The casual assumption that a female producer must secretly have a man doing all the technical work isn’t such an issue for Lowther these days—not because the industry has gotten better, she points out—but because she now takes those comments with the pinch of salt they deserve. “I still get people asking those kinds of questions, but I don’t really care. I think I’m more secure in myself now, and more confident.”
Lowther is someone who clearly loves the technical nuts and bolts of music-making. So, we’re curious – does she use any AI tools in her workflow to speed up her process? “I haven’t played around with it much yet,” she shrugs. “It’s definitely interesting and there are certain processes you could shortcut. For me, the fun part is starting something fresh – but the final 5 or 10 per cent of finishing a track can be horrible. So, AI that can help with mixing stuff… I’d probably love that.”
Image: Dillon Howl for MusicTech
At the same time, Lowther has no illusions about the economic impact that some music makers are facing. “I really feel for people who have devoted their life to making music for sync and licensing; that’s the first area of music that is really gonna take a hit,” she predicts. “I’ve got friends who work on TV and commercial stuff and they take it really seriously – when they get a brief, they’ll spend days trying to make it perfect. But already that work is being devalued, the thinking is ‘Why would I pay you two grand when I can make it with an AI prompt?’
“But in terms of original music,” she continues. “I don’t think AI is really an issue. Maybe I’m ignorant, but I think artists have always used new technologies and integrated them into their work. If people can use AI prompts to make music that bangs, that makes people genuinely excited, then I’m down for that.”
At least in Lowther’s own music, we’re unlikely to see any prompt-generated beats and chords any time soon. For her, the allure of music is clearly not just the end result but the creative act itself. “The whole reason I got into music was because I really just enjoy making it,” she says thoughtfully. “I love the process of it – the hands-on stuff of playing keyboard or drumming out some beats, of just losing yourself for a little bit.”
With her album only recently released, and with shows planned in Europe and Asia in the coming months, Lowther could be forgiven for taking a bit of time to decompress. Instead, and staying true to form, she’s diving straight back into writing. “The past couple of days I’ve been making new music and it feels so great,” she beams. “Now that the album is out, I’m itching to write – it’s time to lock myself in the studio again.”
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