Ashnikko’s upbringing has certainly informed her music. As a youth, she absorbed a wide array of different styles of music.
“I grew up listening to a lot of MIA and Missy Elliot and Pharrell and Gwen Stefani and Paramore — a lot of icons,” she says in a recent phone interview from Minneapolis. Ashnikko performs at 7 p.m. on Saturday at the Agora Theatre. “I was drawn to artists that I saw myself in at that time.”
Not initially musically inclined, she began writing poems when she was 12 years old. She turned toward music when she turned 16. Her family moved to Europe, and then, Ashnikko moved to London on her own.
“From the age of 13 to now I spent in Eastern Europe and then in London,” she says. “The biggest impact on my music has been living in London, which is so musically rich as a city. I don’t know if I have the hindsight yet to be able to see how it has impacted my music. I might have a clearer vision of that in ten years time. It definitely shaped me into the person that I am. I love London. It’s a beautiful city. I was exposed to a lot of different styles of music and different ways of writing songs and a number of musical geniuses. I got a crash course in songwriting.”
After releasing a series of EPs, Ashnikko put out the trap-inspired Demidevil mixtape in 2021. Critical acclaim followed.
“Demidevil was my first proper body of work,” she says. “I had been biding my time and learning about songwriting for so many years. Getting to a point where you feel comfortable and sharing that with the world took a while for me. Now, I’m like, ‘Fuck it. I just have to share it.’ I don’t like sitting on things for too long.”
Weedkiller, her official studio debut, is half scif-fi and half biographical.
“It’s an amalgamation of all my favorite sci-fi dystopian influences and inspirations,” Ashnikko says of the album. “It’s about a dystopian world that was destroyed by these life-sucking machines called Weedkillers. They destroy this utopia. The album is set in that realm. All the songs connect. Some of the songs are more autobiographical. It just kind of poured out. I knew that sonically, I wanted it to all feel like it was in the same world. We tried to score it like a film. Lyrically, there were some songs in the narrative and some that weren’t, but there is still a through-line of intentional sonic choices.”
Mostly recorded in Los Angeles, the album features multiple producers and yet still sounds cohesive.
“I worked with a lot of people,” says Ashnikko. “I worked with my best friend Oscar Scheller. BloodPop was on a song. Ethel Cain house-produced the song we made together. There were so many amazing musicians that were involved in this project. I feel very grateful.”
“World Eater” works well as an opening track because it’s so expansive and serves as a “big dystopian wasteland song,” as Ashnikko puts it. Not that every song is jarring. “Worms” is so poppy that Ashnikko almost didn’t put it on the album.
“Ultimately, I feel like narratively it really fit,” she says of the track. “It helped tell the story. It felt like a necessary layer to the album.”
“Cheerleader” is actually semi-autobiographical, and Ashnikko says the dark video suggests the song’s theme.
“It’s shot from the POV from the Beast, this watching and watching presence and gaze,” she says of the track’s music video. “The cheerleaders are dancing and making this sacrifice for eternal youth but dying in the process. I think people can draw their own conclusions from that.”
The live show will feature what Ashnikko calls “this kind of abstract surreal forest with all the visuals taking you into the Weedkiller realm.”
After releasing such a fully realized debut album, does Ashnikko have some sense of where the music will take her next?
“I don’t know,” she says. “Hopefully, upward. I’m just taking things day-by-day.”
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This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.