Sarah Kinsley

New York’s Sarah Kinsley is fascinated by creating imaginary worlds and alternate realities. She tries to conjure these with her music, but it requires the unlocking of one’s imagination to really go there. Sarah encourages you to try it though. We all need an escape.  

Born in California, and raised in Connecticut and Singapore before returning to New York to attend Columbia University, this perfectly unusual leftfield pop singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist (Sarah plays the piano, synth, guitar, ondes Martenot, glass bowls, and some violin on her recent debut album Escaper) studied music and was creating much positive noise and conversation online long before she had signed a record deal. Everything she was putting out was home-spun; selfproduced, self-written and self-performed. Sarah made a habit of documenting her process, and it was one such video, uploaded in response to the misconception that “Women don’t produce music” that documented Sarah recording the sounds of tapping on a desk, opening a door, switching on a light, thumping on a mattress and flicking a wine glass, splicing them all together and forming the introduction to a prior EP track, Over + Under, that captured the imagination of a young audience who have been feverishly following her every move since.  

Sarah grew up in the world of classical music, studying the likes of Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel. She started out behind the piano before playing violin in the perfectionas-necessity world of orchestra. Meanwhile, this disciplined student of music was a teenager falling in love with the exciting, “unsubstantial” pop music that dominated Top 200 radio. Debut LP Escaper in some ways marries many of those unlikely contexts—substantial pop that flowers with lush string arrangements. “I'm just such a sucker for massive, grand songs,” she says. “I think it’s the classical musician in me who loves symphonies and the magnum opus effect.”  

Named one of Vevo’s Artists to Watch in 2024, Sarah has met sold out audiences  singing her songs in unison right across the US and Europe. There’s something very communal about the experiences that Sarah and her band manage to evoke. The young crowd is feverish, greeting each song like an old hit, and forgetting themselves for some time in her company, allowing Sarah to massage their imaginations. Support tours, headline tours, and early festival appearances – it’s as exciting to her fans in the UK and Europe as it is to those in the US. They’re turning up in their droves and travelling miles and miles (and miles) to see her.