“Where do I begin…?”
KIERA LYONS
singer - songwriter - musician - poet - video artist
Kiera Lyons is an antidote to the endless stream of sameness we hear from singers today. She is the voice of her generation’s future, not its past. Digging deeper than the plastic party pop blanketing the airwaves and streamers, her lyrics grapple with our youth’s bitter burden: a world of decay, anxiety and depression, of alienation, heartbreak and longing at the core of Gen Z’s struggle. Her raw, unapologetic vocal performances capture the authentic spirit of her peers, while offering a powerful insight into their experience for others.
EPK VIDEO:
While Kiera may have been verbally precocious, music is her first language. Born during a snowstorm in Boston and raised in sunny Los Angeles, Kiera showed an interest in music before she could speak. As an infant, Kiera would mimic musical phrases with perfect pitch. From Imogen Heap, to Thelonious Monk, to Fleetwood Mac, Kiera was raised on a steady and eclectic diet of music throughout her childhood, the influence of which can be heard and felt in her own music.
Kiera has embodied such extremes in her ethnocultural heritage (Irish-Welsh mother, Costa Rican father). She wrote her first song at age 6, which her parents submitted to a national arts competition. In advancing to the state level, she performed the song several times for audiences of up to over 500. By age 12, her love of EDM artists like Avicii and Skrillex sparked a desire to begin avidly exploring music production, and by her teens was sculpting her own unique sound: an emotive blend of indie folk, pop, electronica, and art rock.
Kiera wrote, produced, and recorded her first single, “The Spoils,” at age 14. She took a videographer friend to Vasquez Rocks and shot a music video, which she entered into a competition at her arts-specialized school, winning the prize for best music video. This kicked off the production and release of a series of singles and music videos, their distribution on all major music streaming platforms, and the beginning of Kiera’s social media marketing efforts.
Kiera also began performing live as often as she could:
In 2020, Kiera released her debut EP, “Hiraeth,” a timely reflection on the bittersweet longing and loss currently felt by so many. She also began work on what she plans to be her first album, an emotive journey through adolescence, alienation, and heartbreak in its many forms, tentatively titled “I Was a Ghost.”
MUSIC VIDEOS & MORE
Kiera’s passion for weaving music, lyrics, performance, and visuals into an indelible emotional journey takes center stage in these official videos. Also, take a look at select covers in which Kiera puts her unique spin to create unexpected renditions.
MUSIC
Kiera Lyons’ debut EP, “Hiraeth” (“HEER-eyth”), is a bittersweet journey filled with timeless yearning. According to Wikipedia, Hiraeth is a Welsh word that has no direct English translation. The University of Wales, Lalmpeter likens it to a homesickness tinged with grief and sadness over the lost or departed, especially in the context of Wales and Welsh culture. It is a mixture of longing, nostalgia, wistfulness or an earnest desire for the Wales of the past.
Kiera’s Celtic and Latinx heritages infuse her atmospheric indie pop/folk tracks and haunting arrangements, rich with multi-layer vocal textures. The result is a bittersweet but hopeful contemplation of the transformative time we’re living in.
Listen to Kiera’s latest release, “Hiraeth,” and more.
PRESS PHOTOS
REVIEWS
A&R Factory Feature, 08-12-2021
Hurry Back – Kiera Lyons (reviewed by Dave Franklin)
December 3, 2020
If Kiera Lyons music has taught us anything it’s that it is possible to make pop music which is musically elegant, sonically eloquent and a big step above the usual chart fodder we see vying for the pop-dollar. Aflame was the perfect demonstration of exactly that, and Hurry Back just seems to underline the potential of such a musical outlook. Instead of the usual cheap and catchy concepts, style over substance pose and obvious gimmicks, Hurry Back creates a real allure through controlled understatements, vocal delivery which really belies Lyons’ youthfulness, and finally explosive, emotive and occasionally epic sonic moves.
Hurry Back paves the way for her new e.p. Hiraeth, a Welsh word for “homesickness or nostalgia, an earnest longing or desire, or a sense of regret … the feeling of longing for a home that never was,” and it is to such hauntological and nostalgic themes that she looks for inspiration. The song is a lament on the subjects of loss and longing, of that feeling that something important has disappeared from your life as time has passed. And whether consciously or not, the song is the perfect place where such thoughts expressed music gently wash up on the shores of Jacques Derrida’s writings about cultural memory. But I may be over-stressing the point somewhat.
All most people need Hurry Back to be is a cool and interesting take on pop music and it is certainly that, capturing the essence of classical music whilst using contemporary sounds and samples to replicate a more mainstream take on it. It drifts rather than drives, it is graceful rather than groovesome, it is poised and gossamer light, built of the slightest textures and the deftest of sonic touches. And even when it decides to up its sonic game, to really make its presence felt, it does so merely by adding more and more slender strands and layers of delicate sound rather than resulting to anything as unimaginative as just turning up the volume.
Hiraeth comes with two additional songs, the more folk infused It Goes and the chilled indie ballad The Oaks, both more than worthy songs, but for me, Hurry Back is the crowning sonic moment of the three. (Though it is all relative and any young wannabe with any sense would kill to be given any of these chilled slices of pop poise…provided their record company’s marketing department’s had run the numbers first and said it was okay.)
Whilst the competition is looking for the next sing-along sensation, dance routine driven automaton or repugnant rapper, Kiera Lyons is truly marking out some unique territory for herself and her music feels pure, untainted by the industry, honest and emotive in a way that we haven’t felt in the mainstream for far too long.
Aflame – Kiera Lyons (reviewed by Dave Franklin)
February 19, 2019
There is a lot of power in understatement. Even when trying to convey the most emotive of ideas, the most universal of situations, the most heart-felt of passions, you can often create a bigger impact through the delicacy of space and restraint than with bombast and weight. Aflame is a testament to such an idea, and whilst it is interestingly captioned by the artist herself as “not a love song” it is undoubtedly a song about love in the wider sense.
On top of a platform of spacious piano and gentle sweeping synth washes, Kiera Lyons’ voice is both captivating and confident and even when the beat does kick in to drive the song forward, the step up is one of balance allowing the song to play gently with dynamic shifts rather than offer lurching changes of pace or clumsy shifts of gear. And it is this attitude which sets the song apart from most other pop music being made today. For this is pop music, in the broadest, most balladic sense of the term, but whereas most people working in the same field today are effectively checking themselves in the mirror, dressing their songs up with cliched tricks and augmenting their videos with fake glamour and dance routines, Aflame deals in openness and honesty.
And that is where the charm of the song, and indeed the video, lies. The sound of a young woman expressing her thoughts in a mature, poetic, and realistic way, and a video that wanders between the everyday and the elevated but which retains its footing in the real world. Many artists her age would be ranting about boys, nightclubs, social media, and the like, blunt lyrical instruments that hit home without the grace and charisma being displayed here.
So having established that Aflame sits somewhere between timeless emotional ballad and accessible contemporary pop, that Kiera Lyons has a voice and style that belies her years, that she can write songs that have mass appeal to pop-pickers her own age through to a more discerning, older set, the only question really is this: how long before one of the major labels makes the obvious and long overdue move and signs her, and in doing so lays the way for an alternative, integral, and more deftly pursued pop pathway into the future.
