Deep in the Cat Cafe With Kassie Krut

It’s raining cats and dogs on the day I meet up with the members of Kassie Krut at a kitty cafe, and the animals are hiding. As we sip coffee and hit our vapes around a dinky table on the covered outdoor patio of the Cute Cat Cafe in Ridgewood, Queens, I start to wonder if there are, in fact, any cute cats roaming the premises. Eventually a calico emerges from the soggy backyard and saunters around the patio, catching the attention of a little girl through the window of the back door. The toddler comes tottering out hands first but the cat dashes off. Such is the feline way.

Pinning down a band IRL can sometimes feel as elusive as befriending a cat; trying too hard will almost certainly push them away. With their sweetly taunting industrial pop, Kassie Krut are poised to bridge the gap between experimental rock fans and IDM disciples. Naturally, the three members are what you’d call “heads,” so the way in is by comparing notes on underground heroes from DJ Rashad to Broadcast. Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert, and Matt Anderegg tip me off to the O.G. dubstep producer Plastician and make me regret missing a recent HiTech and Nia Archives show. Later on, they send over a playlist of their influences that, in addition to mainstays like Haruomi Hosono, the Cure, and Mica Levi, also includes a half-dozen obscure producers (all of them extremely sick) and a version of “The Blue Danube” played with construction tools and theremin. “As much as we all like electronic music,” says Kurt, “the ambition for this project is not to be a purely electronic project.”

So yes, they are intimidatingly cool—but also exceedingly friendly. My heart melts when Kurt excitedly blurts out how he and Alpert first met: “We were high school sweethearts!” That was in London roughly half their lives ago (though neither are British). They started playing guitar music together, which continued through undergrad at Bard College and, in 2011, the founding of their math-rock band Palm. Last year, they got married. The couple befriended Anderegg roughly a decade ago when Palm toured with the Athens, Georgia indie-folk group Mothers (he was the drummer), and asked him to produce the quartet’s third album, 2022’s Nicks and Grazes. That record marked the beginning of a more digital sound and signaled the end of Palm altogether, eventually making way for Kassie Krut. The second-to-last Palm performance in Brooklyn, in September 2023, was one of the more uncomfortably packed and feverish shows I’ve ever seen; their fans clearly weren’t ready to say goodbye. But there’s something refreshing—and probably healthy—about officially closing one project before starting another and shifting genres in earnest. 

Kurt had occasionally used the Kassie Krut moniker for music he was releasing on his own. “When Palm ended, I wasn’t that excited by the idea of having a solo project,” he says. “The most exciting moments that I’ve had making music involved close collaboration. I wanted to explore that with a new framework, to step out of what we were comfortable doing in Palm and make something that sounded different to us. We called it a new name, giving Palm its respect—but also, it was thrilling to create a project that had new principles while maintaining some of the same DIY or noisy elements.”

Where they used to make cacophonous rock music with knotty, interlocking guitar parts, now Kurt and Alpert tinker with and refine an electronic palette that pulls from everywhere but particularly emphasizes clattering percussion and sing-song vocals. Last fall’s “Reckless” served as a bold and blistering introduction to Kassie Krut, with Alpert spelling out the band name slowly, like Kim Gordon reciting a nursery rhyme over a Jlin beat. It’s easy to imagine someone DJ’ing “Reckless” into Tinashe’s “Nasty,” two alien bangers forever united by their sworn allegiance to freakdom.

Throughout our conversation, Kurt and Alpert sit on the same side of the table, often making eye contact while one of them is speaking, carefully listening and rounding out each other’s thoughts—you know, couples’ telepathy. They share a clear fondness for Anderegg, a Georgia native with a more sheepish demeanor. He had never produced other peoples’ music before working with Palm—Kurt and Alpert had to coax him into it—and he was reluctant to join Kassie Krut at first, too. “My only hesitation was not wanting to hold it back,” Anderegg says. “I wanted to make sure it made sense to be thought of as a band member. I was happy to collaborate in any way, but it’s actually turned into much more than an engineering or production role. It’s really nice to have an outlet for songwriting.”

The six tracks on Kassie Krut’s 2024 self-titled EP started with Kurt, and the others helped to turn them from sketches to songs. “You usually hear things before anyone and you really help me form the ideas when they’re in very early stages,” Kurt says to Alpert as the rain trickles down and the cats continue to hide. Anyone who has lived with a fellow musician, especially a partner, can understand this dynamic. They start playing around on a drum machine or a beat-making app, and suddenly you’re coming up with melodies and making voice memos of the best ones. These days, Alpert and Anderegg are contributing initial ideas too. They all stress the importance of editing as a form of authorship in itself. “A lot of the contributions that we each make to a song are like, ‘Does this sound need to be there?’” Alpert says. “I think if there’s any compositional ethos that we’re bringing to this project, it’s trying to use fewer elements and simplify.”

“When you’re in a rock band and you’re standing in a dark rehearsal space that you maybe only have for a couple hours, there’s only so much desire to say, ‘Let’s sit down and put our instruments away and talk about this,’” Kurt adds. “With this project, there’s a lot more, ‘What’s working about this part and what isn’t?’” 

Live, they seem like they’re searching for new ways to present primarily electronic music, whether it’s the piece of metal junk they use as a percussion instrument (as seen on the “Reckless” cover art) or the way Kurt hits a half-strung guitar on a table with a drumstick and runs it through a delay effect. “It’s an interesting time where musicians are collectively trying to figure out other ways electronic music can be performed, besides just DJing,” says Kurt. Recalling a recent Jan Jelinek show, he cites something as simple as a camera feed of hands working the machines, projected onto the back wall of a venue. “We saw Astrid Sonne in Philly at a festival, and she used a lot of backing tracks but with strings, and she was manipulating them as well,” adds Alpert. “It was incredibly moving.”

The goal is to create a live show that utilizes more acoustic elements (in addition to live drums, vocals, and keyboard), so that it “can be as physical, visceral, and in-your-face as possible,” says Kurt. At their EP release show in December, a tipsy Alpert admitted to the crowd that they were very nervous. Not that they had reason to be—Kassie Krut transformed the Ridgewood rock venue TV Eye into the dang clerb, all dark and foggy and throbbing but with an element of anything could happen. “A good show should make you feel like things can go wrong,” Kurt says. “You want to feel like things could fall apart.”

Though Kassie Krut’s members have all played music for more than a decade, the old rules have been tossed out and the new ones are still forming. Everything is on the table. Alpert mentions drum’n’bass; Kurt suggests working with rappers. It’s not hard to imagine a Drain Gang associate mumbling atop a Kassie Krut beat, though personally I’m rooting for a local collab with someone on Backwoodz, where passion and remove can mingle. And they’ve already crafted some killer remixes, including an ominous-as-fuck take on their pals Water From Your Eyes. 

When I see Alpert and Kurt a couple months later, at a mutual friends’ birthday party, we get to discussing New Year’s resolutions. Alpert mentions something that strikes me as remarkably doable. Her goal, essentially, is for everything to keep going as well as it has been. The glow of a path forged and in progress is all over her face. The very possibility of becoming jaded has been short-circuited by the jolt of something new and playful.

Below is a playlist compiled by Kassie Krut, featuring songs that have been influential to as of late, available to paying Hearing Things subscribers only. If you have yet to sign up, please consider it—your support allows us to go in-depth on fascinating new artists and so much more.