Kester’s craftsmanship for writing delicately layered pop has been steadily honed for over a decade. After an itinerant childhood moving around The Netherlands, Kester took up music lessons at her high school and later toyed with the idea of songwriting when she elected to study abroad at the University College Dublin. She found Ireland’s folkloric heritage to be refreshingly different from her home country’s more realistic traditions. “All the arts and literature that comes from Ireland, or even the UK, I feel like it has some more fantasy; room for big emotions,” she explains. “It really sparked something in me.”
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Band: Robin Kester: vocals, backing vocals, acoustic guitar |
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Kester started to develop her writing voice whilst at university and soon realised that she was becoming more and more serious about the music. In 2018 she released her debut EP, ‘Peel The Skin’, and by 2020 she had enough material to release full a record. The release of her first full-length was delayed however, due to Corona Virus, with Robin instead opting to change her plans and first release the “mini album” ‘This Is Not A Democracy’. This project saw Robin further grow as an artist, with ‘Cigarette Song’, a collaborative track with Villagers’ Conor O’Brien, receiving widespread acclaim amongst the Dutch press and UK airplay from Guy Garvey on BBC Radio 6 Music.
Three years later, Kester would release her critically acclaimed debut album, titled ‘Honeycomb Shades’. Unflinchingly honest in its reflections on her father’s cancer diagnosis and the relatively early death of her uncle, it was named as best Dutch album of the year by prestigious publications NRC and Volkskrant and was nominated for Best Album of the Year by 3voor12.
Robin’s new album, ‘Dark Sky Reserve’, sees her take another risk, as she committed to recording abroad for the first time. The full album was recording in Bristol with the help of producer Ali Chant (PJ Harvey, Perfume Genius). This experience of recording in a new environment afforded Kester artistic clarity she hadn’t experienced before: “With the debut album, we had so much time and it was during COVID, so I kept going back at things, doubting myself a lot. This time, we had such a clear period of time. In the moment, you had to embrace things as they were, which was challenging but ultimately very satisfying.”
With the help of Ali Chant, Kester began to carve out her unique sound that’s at once minimalist yet gorgeously rich and warm, inspired by the likes of Talk Talk, Portishead, Air and PJ Harvey. “I wanted it to sound very human. With everything going on nowadays, it’s cool to really appreciate things that are human.”
Much of Kester’s music concerns her relationship with herself, something which is touched upon in ‘Happy Sad (It’s A Party)’ – written in one night leading up to her Bristol studio sessions. “I felt like I was way in over my head because I was going to work with people I really admired. I was so insecure, but there was this other part of me who didn’t want to acknowledge that side, so I think it was the two opposites within myself that were fighting talking to each other now.”
At the same time, Kester was grappling with an existential crisis, not helped by therapy that wasn’t working, a lingering depression, and the effects of her new ADHD medication. It prompted her to take refuge in the night to write ‘Dark Sky Reserve’. “I was fighting a lot of it and thinking, ‘I should be better, I should do better…’ I was really hating myself for not being the way I wanted to be.
“When I wrote the album, that’s why almost all of that was written at night where I felt safer and it was dark outside,” she adds. “I didn’t feel guilty about wasting my time because it was like bonus time – no one expects anything from you when it’s the middle of the night. I could see myself for who I am.”
Menwhile, a pivotal drive to nearby Wales during the recording process saw Kester stumble upon the ethereal, unsettling beauty of the reservoir in Talybont-on-Usk, which had deceptively idyllic charm: “I was so mesmerised because it was February, but it was icy and beautiful, there was a little bit of snow in the mountains, and it looked very peaceful. Then we started to walk near the water’s edge, and I was imagining swimming there. I saw these signs like ‘don’t swim’, and all of a sudden I noticed how eerie the area was. For a brief moment, I was completely somewhere else.”
As soon as Kester clambered into the backseat of the car, she was brimming with ideas that helped her finish many of the songs on ‘Dark Sky Reserve’: “It’s just magical and very strange”.
To Kester, lyrics are some of the most important aspects of her music, citing Julia Jacklin and Mitski as people who are able to be honest yet enigmatic in their writing. The trip to Talybont helped Kester out of a rut to finish three songs on the record: ‘Talybont-on-Usk’, which Kester wrote about her trip, ‘The Daylight’, and ‘Perspective’. It is ‘Perspective’ perhaps that best summarises the ethos of the album: a way of revisiting the past, accepting the ephemerality of its truth, and moving forward a stronger, wiser person. “It is sinister, but at the same time there’s hope in it. You need to go to a dark place first to get that kind of perspective.”
For more information contact Stefan.Hayes@v2benelux.com
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