KIER Names Her Peers Around New Single ‘Twenty Something’

KIER sorted the artists she counts as her peers into two lists, one for smaller artists and one for bigger ones, and I find that small act of filing more revealing than any manifesto. It’s the habit of a songwriter who knows exactly where she stands and where she is looking. On the first list sit Jade Bird, Maisie Peters, Lizzy McAlpine, Holly Humberstone, Dylan, Suki Waterhouse and Matilda Mann. On the second are Gracie Abrams, Olivia Dean, Sabrina Carpenter and HAIM. One reads as the room she is in now, the other as the stage she can see from the doorway.

What these names share is a first person that never stands on ceremony. Each of them writes about the business of growing up, and each is as likely to land a joke as a bruise. Maisie Peters can make heartbreak sound like gossip over a kitchen table. Sabrina Carpenter turns a raised eyebrow into a hook. Lizzy McAlpine and Gracie Abrams pull everything in close and drop their voices, so a whole song can turn on one small admission. HAIM bring sisterly ease to their songs and Olivia Dean brings a warmth that never curdles into sentiment. Put them side by side and you hear a shared conviction that your own life is worth singing about, provided you are honest and willing to laugh at yourself.

Jade Bird is the name that explains how KIER found her way into this company. Bird came up with a rootsier, Americana edge before opening her songs out into something broader, and KIER, who made her name on the British country and Americana circuit, has taken a similar turn. Choosing Bird as a reference point feels less like borrowing a sound and more like naming a route.

That route arrives at ‘Twenty Something’, a single that is out now and one she hopes will also work as a bop for everyone else.

Her subject is the decade everyone promises will make sense. Your twenties, she says, are sold as a time when everything falls into place, “but for a lot of us it feels like the polar opposite.” It is a theme every name on her lists has sung about in one way or another.

Lists like these show you the shelf a songwriter wants to stand on. ‘Twenty Something’ is her opening line in that conversation, and it is a confident one.

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