On Kailee Morgue's Here In Your Bedroom, Live Drums Made All The Difference

it can be springtime, yet Kailee Morgue just wants to go to Halloween Town.


The spooky shop in Burbank, California is residence to props, accessories, masks, and all things ghoulish, and for Morgue — a 21-year-old rising artist whose sound blends sharp punk influences with a cloudy contemporary pop sound — it's all she can think about while self-isolating in the new, sparsely decorated apartment she moved into just before she had to hunker down. "They have the masks from Halloween III that are like $500, however I just want them. I'm like, 'Yes! I plan to drop $500 for those masks!'" She told MTV News recently.


As she crouched on the floor of her new place and took a recent Zoom call, she spoke her new EP, Here in Your Bedroom, a six-song collection with nary a creepy tune in the bunch. As a substitute, it's packed with live drums, chunky power chords, as well as a sparking cherry-bomb "manic anthem" called "This Is Why I'm Hot" — no relation to the Mims classic. Though lose seen success with 2018's subterranean "Medusa" and the downbeat kiss-off "F**k U," Morgue's new EP allowed her to go deeper into the more rollicking music that raised her, and also because the diaristic storytelling she ripped straight out of her own life.


"If it was a song like 'Medusa,' like, who cares if somebody helped me co-write that? They didn't, however if they did, it's so much a story about something that didn't happen to me that it can would be cool to bounce these elements [off of someone else]," she mentioned. Yet with something that is so personalized, I wouldn't aspire to get that [help]. So I just really wanted to create that clear."


That's why she tweeted, once the EP dropped, "The credits on certain platforms might mention otherwise nevertheless I wrote the complete EP on my own besides a co-write on 'Tied Up' and I am fucking Overjoyed of this project." Sort in attempt to get to that place of pride, Morgue worked with producer Cameron Hale on matching the correct instrumentals to her words. That included plenty of live drums, a staple of the slick punk-inspired bands like Blink-182, Paramore, and No Doubt lose grown up on. They're the gunpowder on "This Is Why I'm Hot" and fellow barnburner "Wisconsin Ave" that makes them really smoke.


"I even remember As soon as I sent ['Wisconsin Ave'] to my A&R my boss, and so they were like, 'Live drums? OK...' Although I instructed them producer, 'I want this to sound like a musical group. I want it to sound full,'" Morgue mentioned. "Because I had just gone on a tour and I was touring with a musical group — two bands, actually — and I was just like, 'I'm playing one drummer as well as a backing track and I really want it to be bigger than that.'"


"Wisconsin Ave" sounds a little bit like Lorde's "Ribs" given the Warped Tour treatment. It's so endearing due to the knocking percussion that, by the time it climaxes in a cyclone of post-punk energy, provides the ideal rigid counterpoint for Morgue's floating vocals. The trick also recently made songs like Halsey's "3am" and Broods's "Peach" identically leap out from headphones; it's true of the chasmic pounds on Morgue's opener "Still" and the Eric Valentine-style road-flattened cracks that run through "This Is Why I'm Hot."


Nevertheless that's only one sonic element of Here in Your Bedroom, the EP that takes its title from a Goldfinger song. Single "Knew You" distills that urgency into a subtler powder, "Tied Up" flaunts Morgue's nocturnal and jazzy side, and shiny gem "Dying to Live" is pure wiggly dance-pop. "We made it from scratch in a couple of hours, and that song was certainly not what I thought it could be she mentioned. "Having a '80s dance track that I'm referencing, dancing with myself, is a very random thing. Although I think it's more sonically that I was like, 'Oh I didn't know I'd go there.'"


Here in Your Bedroom (which dropped April 24) is unafraid to explore new terrain, which makes sense for Morgue, who recorded and burned her first-ever CD of music while she was 11. She still has it, and also two others, although "nobody sees them." ("It's there for sentimental purposes," she mentioned) Around age 8, she began trial and error with songwriting by singing new words over melodies by radio hits from artists like Kelly Clarkson. Thirteen years later, she's got her own melodies, though she appreciates the idea of not thinking also hard about songs as she's making them — something she learned from loving Blink-182.


"I like the idea of writing things that don't need to be thought about that much because I think that a lot of times, you could get stuck in your head and think, 'This has to mean something, and I'm being also hard on myself,'" she mentioned. "So sort of wandering off and doing that a little made me realize I can actually implement this into the music that I make if I just alter it a little bit bit."


Another thing she's integrated into her music is her pure love of the Halloween movie franchise. "I made way more songs that sound like 'This Is Why I'm Hot.' They just didn't come out," she mentioned, mentioning the slasher cut that she could tease through the a Instagram snippet in the future. Attempt to hear it, though, in your head: a two-minute, punky lightning bolt about the fictional mass murders of Michael Myers, booming with big drums and buzzsaw riffs. Morgue might not directly even need those $500 masks.