STARLY KIND "Starly Kind" is about finding comfort in a personal hellscape

The song title’s on STARLY KIND’s upcoming EP “Inferno: (Xe/Xem)” (releasing on CorpoRAT Records in late Spring), were first conceived as lines in a poem, and the six-track project retains that literary sensibility in both structure and lyrical movement. The single “Starly Kind” serves as the narrative preamble, introducing the shamanistic demon.

A sparse beat and grimy bassline open the track before a chorus of airy, stacked-harmony vocals enters as bandleader Starly Lou Riggs sings: I fell to the ground / Fell to the ground in Roswell / Neighbor to the gates of hell / This town will flood of / Body and blood lust. These lines establish the EP’s overarching theme of queer existential angst.

“Why were we put in such a hostile environment?” the song seems to ask, as Starly Kind grapples with their descent into a personal hellscape.

“This song is about finding comfort in hell,” Riggs says. “At first, they plead to escape—in these woods I chant, call to the sky ‘please take me alive’ —but they eventually arrive at an uneasy acceptance: please keep me alive/please keep me divine.”

“Musically, Starly resists genre descriptors, existing instrumentally between elements of metal, jazz, and more, layering vocals, saying the same words with different energies, in different modalities. All of it points to their underlying thesis, which is that they are not what you might expect…”— Henry Whittier-Ferguson / Eleven PDX

“…when a scream is heard, it turns audiences’ heads and commands them to move their bodies. But whose scream in particular? Starly Kind’s…”— The Underground Edit

In that liminal space between dreams and nightmares resides Starly Kind. There, the project’s mastermind, Starly Lou Riggs, presides over a hellscape infested with demonic symbolism, esoteric childhood lore, intrepid pan-genre explorations, stuffed animals, chains, spikes, and white lace. Within this self-stylized perdition, they explore the intricacies of gender in relation to societal pressures, feeling monstrous in the wake of structured gender roles and expectations.

“When you realize you’re queer later in life, you can fall back into childhood because you lost a lot of time feeling like you didn’t fit in,” says the São Paulo-based artist. “Starly Kind is an alter ego, collecting all the little pieces of my childhood, uplifting queer and fem people, and dismantling binaries. I’m non-binary in everything—you can’t put me in a box.”

Starly Kind is releasing their CorpoRAT Records debut, Inferno: (Xe/Xem), in May 2026. The six-song EP will be available for streaming and physically as a limited run on cassette, CD, and vinyl, including lathe cuts for the singles, “Starly Kind” and “Demon Dreams,” with screen-printed art on the B-side. Starly co-produced Inferno: (Xe/Xem) alongside their partner, Leo Fazio, who also played bass on all the tracks save “Demon Dreams.” Piano was performed by Matheus Vieira, and Inferno: (Xe/Xem) was mixed and mastered at Veredas Áudio in São Paulo by engineer Iran Ribas.

Starly Kind is the culmination of Riggs as a multi-hyphenate creative: a songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, journalist, visual artist, among other things. To date, Starly Kind has released a pair of singles and a live EP, and performed throughout Brazil and Portland, Oregon where they lived previously, then playing in the doom-y griefgaze band, Death Parade.

Starly Kind invites comparisons to King Woman, Chelsea Wolfe, Nuvolascura, and yeule. Riggs’s songs are adventurous collage art, flirting with but never committing to emo, punk, doom, screamo, shoegaze, new glitch, jazz, Brazilian music, and haunting David Lynch-esque cinematic musicality. These tracks are thrilling sojourns through challenging odd time signatures, startling dynamic shifts, and dense textural passages featuring clarinet, flute, and distressed samples. They are frightening, empowering, and oddly comforting.

Riggs brings Starly Kind to life with a raw emotional live show that exudes an extra-terrestrial-creature-from-the-stars pageantry, occult ceremoniousness, and scrubbed-raw purgation.

Starly Kind’s latest, Inferno: (Xe/Xem), explores queerness through the lens of Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. It is the first installment of a three-part release series, concluding with Paradise. Throughout the EP, Riggs revels in extreme dynamics, navigating jostling music shifts with aplomb, easing between breathy singing and blood-curdling screams.

On the disquietingly sweet, electro-pop single, “Starly Kind,” they summon a fantastical universe of childlike night terrors. “I can remember, as a kid, dreaming about climbing into a basket and descending to hell,” Riggs recounts. The single, “Demon Dreams,” is an imaginatively-arranged romp through synth-pop, screamo, punk, and deconstructed alt-rock. This is the thematic bookend of “Starly Kind.” Here, the once transient and troubled cosmic demon has found a home.

All this to say, the Starly Riggs story doesn’t begin with Riggs being beamed to earth from some darkly exotic netherworld. They moved around as a child. Starly was born in Roswell, New Mexico (referenced in the single, “Starly Kind”), spent their younger years in Ohio as a non-religious family living amongst an Evangelical church-going community, before their family settled in Ukiah, California. Riggs was a shy, sensitive, and eager-to-please child that struggled to suppress outsider feelings that they would come to understand in high school as queerness. Their catharsis was in pounding the keys on the family piano as a punk rock purge of shameful feelings. It was a brash expression in sharp contrast to their family’s lineage of musical training—their mom sang classical and their grandmother was an opera singer.

Music remained a solitary pursuit in the face of the local music scene’s toxic machismo, and college wasn’t much better. Riggs discovered this playing bass in their first band. “After getting offstage someone said to me, ‘you should smile more.’ No one else in the band was smiling!” they recall.

In 2014, Riggs moved to Portland where they joined Death Parade, starting out on keys, but later switching to guitar, having never played the instrument live. “I felt like Laura [Hopkins, founding member of Death Parade] and I supported each other in beautiful ways. We both understood what it was like to not be taken seriously as fem people in this music industry,” Riggs says. Ten years later, Riggs moved to Brazil to be closer to their partner. There, they found a nurturing music community.

Brazil has made an indelible imprint on Riggs: the person, and Starly Kind, the tormented musical alien. Their upcoming LP will showcase some of this with its Brazilian music and jazz influences. “I felt very judged in the US, like I always had to prove myself,” Riggs says. “These days I feel this power that I haven’t felt before. I’m fearless.”