Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Launches Label with Abrasive New Album ‘Ruin’

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith will release a new album on 2 October through her own label, Someone Special, which she co-founded this year with James Daniel. The record, titled Ruin: It’s Not Just Music, pushes her sound into deliberately abrasive territory, built around drums and breakbeats rather than the West Coast modular synthesis that defined earlier work like Ears and The Kid.

The announcement lands just days before Smith takes the Barbican stage on 27 May with the London Contemporary Orchestra, where she will perform Ears in full to mark its tenth anniversary. The concert will likely dwell in the gentle, exploratory modular pieces that made her name. The new material signals a sharp turn the other way.

Smith described the shift as a need to make something confrontational, “almost like sonic combat.” She said, “Ruin lives in that moment where everything breaks and something else asserts itself. It’s music for the shock and the aftershock. Sound designed for endurance rather than comfort.” A video for the title track, featuring pole dancer Pedro Esteveaqui, accompanies the announcement.

This year has already been busy. The electronic LP Gush and the orchestral mini-album Thoughts on the Future appeared in 2025, but Ruin marks her first release on Someone Special. The label seems less a vanity project than a necessary container for a record that did not fit her previous patterns. Smith is not simply returning with a new collection; she is redrawing the terms.