Death, Diners & Daughters: An Interview With Jennifer Walton

Art via Evan Solano

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Michael McKinney was born again backwards.

In 2018, Jennifer Walton—a seasoned film and game composer, an ex-goth, and a practiced drummer—graduated from university and flew to America to tour with Kero Kero Bonito. It was something of a manifestation of a dream. Walton had long idolized America from afar, treating even news chyrons and malls as fantastical objects. But this was a strange trip: she drove through the Appalachian Mountains listening to sacred harp music, got her medications and laptop stolen from the group’s van, and stumbled upon a horrific Gordian knot: her father, she learned, was dying of cancer.

“There’s a strange thing about grief,” she tells POW seven years later. “I think some things in life, like falling in love, feel natural and innate. I always feel like it’s an inherited thing from the hundreds of people that have come before me. Grief is also like this. It should be a universal thing. But, for some reason, your brain just cannot compute it, and I don’t know why.”

Over the course of her career, Walton has tried on all sorts of hats. With WHITE NURSE, she interrogated histories of fascist imagery and beliefs in power electronics; with Flash On, she constructed joyfully devilish anti-club tools, collapsing dubstep and techno and the kitchen sink into a pile of who-knows-whats. As one-half of Cryalot, one-third of Microplastics, and one-fifth of NTS Hard Crew, she has been partially responsible for piles of wild-eyed dance-music and serrated pop records.

One way to read Daughters, Walton’s latest LP, is perhaps the simplest: it is a reaction to her time in the States all those years ago, an explicit reckoning with the way the life of her father and the million histories of America tangle up with her own. Another way, of course, is that it’s a head-spinner of a singer-songwriter record: a crash of Midwestern emo batterings and walls of noise. Daughters may be Walton’s most startling release to date, in part because it’s so wholly different from the rest of her oeuvre. It’s the sound of a kid who grew up with Karlheinz Stockhausen and Nine Inch Nails meeting the adult who’s a proud Deadhead and unabashed fan of Julia Holter.

In early September, we had a chance to sit down with Walton over Zoom, digging into her family’s history with experimental music, her relationship with the “completely inhuman” architecture of malls, how a variety of ghosts helped shape Daughters, and more.

​​(This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)