Kai Bosch

"The alt-pop voyager has built a steady catalogue rooted in emotional honesty, with his first two EPs 'SLIPPING’' and 'Spider' finding acclaim online. Out now, 'Bodybag' pivots in a spartan, minimalist direction, with Kai Bosch baring his soul. The single dips into relationship trauma, exploring the long, upsetting days before a romantic partnership comes to a close."

CLASH

"'On “Tulips'... Bosch exposes a more mature, vulnerable figure. While retaining his signature bouncy and gossamer qualities, this subtle evolution to the artist's sound will kibosh any doubts about his potential to keep audiences swaying in dimly-lit venues."

THE LINE OF BEST FIT

"Armed with an artillery of sincere vocals and heartfelt lyrcisicm, alt-pop artist Kai Bosch has cruised onto the music scene to great appraisal. With a musical style that has previously been compared to the likes of James Blake, Kai's discography is a richly emotive blend of subtly undulating electric beats, soft percussive elements and, of course, his own distinctive crooning voice.”  

TMRW MAGAZINE

"I think he’s got something proper special"

MAIA BETH, BBC RADIO 1 FUTURE POP

*****

Charismatic alt-pop artist Kai Bosch announces plans for his next EP 'Love, Throw Me A Bone', a devastatingly beautiful collection of songs about heartbreak following the end of a tumultuous relationship with his ex-boyfriend, and previewed by the new single "Funny", a two-fingers up break-up anthem.

Featuring the previously shared offerings "Tulips" and "Bodybag", this new five-track collection arrives during his most ambitious guise yet. Regularly one to adopt a multitude of diverse ideas into his work, 'Love, Throw Me A Bone' looks to cement that dynamic energy he has been cultivating lately and unveil some of his more innovative efforts yet.

Showcased by the new single, "Funny" perfectly illustrates this adventurous nature he has been moving towards recently. With its smooth and alluring textures set to some groove-filled hooks throughout, 2024 continues to establish him as one of the more explorative names on the rise right now.

Adding about "Funny", he said, "Funny was a total accident for me, I usually like to write about things in hindsight when I can look at something from a distance where I can be a lot more reflective and poetic in my dissection of something - however, with Funny I came into that studio angry! 

"I had been having a really terrible week, I bumped into my ex on the tube for the first time since we broke up and he was a totally different person - that broke my heart all over again, but to make matters worse I found out the next day that he was in a relationship with someone else, and had been since we broke up. 

"I went through such a whirlwind of emotions, but eventually settled on anger, so when I rocked up to the studio with my friend Gabe Coulter I ended up word-vomiting the most unfiltered and unsubtle thoughts into that microphone. 

"As a whole, Funny explores the resentment and anger that I feel for my ex, but also how embarrassing I find it that I spent so long yearning for him - every time that I held my breath going past his stop on the tube, looking for his face in a sea of commuters at rush hour, six months of hoping we would cross paths again and reunite as something other than strangers only to find he had been with someone else the whole time - soul crushing!" 

Having already been extremely busy on the live circuit throughout 2023, including festival appearances at Latitude, Boardmasters and The Great Escape, and supporting both Katie Gregson MacLeod and Gretel Hanlyn on their recent UK/EU tours, Kai Bosch will embark on a four-date headline stint in late April/early May.

Staged under the cover of darkness and imbued with a subtle yet high-stakes sense of emotional drama, the music that Kai Bosch crafts makes a lot of sense if you look not at where he's come from, but where he's been. Having uprooted himself aged 17 from the sleepy town of Polzeath, Cornwall to the throbbing nightlife of Berlin before moving to London, his music is as indebted to the pursuit of sensation as its author.

If the narrative of the small-town boy finding himself in the big city sounds like one taken from a coming-of-age film, then Kai's early years serve only to amp up the redemptive story arc even further. It's easy to forget given the positive recent leaps in queer representation in the media that, even half a decade ago, the public role models for a young gay man growing up in a "very Tory, very closed-minded" area were far more limited. "I came out when I was 14, I was the only gay kid at school and I didn't quite know how to act," he recalls. "At the time, the only film on Netflix that was gay was called 'Gay Best Friend' so you bet I became that. All of a sudden I changed my voice, bleached my hair and started wearing iridescent silver jackets and horrendous foundation. The further and further I got into that, I really did have an identity crisis that took quite a long time to pull myself out of."

During this time, however, Kai had started to discover artists such as Lana Del Rey and Lorde - people whose music embraced sadness and vulnerability, and who showed that there was a beauty to be found in life's messy grey areas. These were women who could transport you to a whole different universe, one far removed from the blinkered reality Kai was actually living in. "From then on, music really became the only thing that helped me cope and escape," he says. "I think someone like Lana probably resonated with me because I wasn't very happy at the time. I'd listen to her and get to be in my own world."

Taking this increasingly important passion, teaching himself the keyboard and starting to write in secret, it took a while for Kai to let anyone into the private musical safe space that he'd started to build. But by the time he reached his second year of college, it just became everything. He applied early to Goldsmiths, was accepted to start on a music course the following year and immediately left for Berlin.

Inspired more by the idea of articulating feeling than any particular genre, the sensory explosion of his new life quickly translated into ripe material. The duality of vulnerability and hedonism that runs through Kai's music, can all be traced to those formative Berlin months.