Q&A: Kleo’s Hyper-Romantic Universe Expands in New Single “Everything Everywhere at Once”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: André Hansen
LOVE AS A CINEMATIC FORCE — For Copenhagen-based singer-songwriter Kleo, love isn’t just an emotion—it’s a force of nature. And on her stunning new single, “Everything Everywhere at Once,” she captures that transformative, all-consuming pull with heart-baring clarity and romantic grandeur.
Released after a year-long writing retreat in the studio, the song marks Kleo’s first offering since her 2023 debut EP I Love This Movie—a title that now feels prophetic. Her music has always carried a cinematic edge, but here, that vision expands into something even more sweeping. Anchored by a gentle yet commanding piano line and enveloped in lush, orchestral strings, “Everything Everywhere at Once” plays like a love scene stretched across galaxies.
“A few years ago, I fell deeply in love, to the point where time and everything around us completely melted together.” Kleo says. “When I’m in love, I feel invincible. The horizon is wide open, and everything is possible—the sun always shines on me, and the wind is always at my back. I always enter these kinds of relationships completely unguarded because that’s where I feel whole and inspired. It’s also this feeling driving me to write my songs.”
At its core, “Everything Everywhere at Once” captures the magnetic and all-consuming experience of falling in love—a feeling Kleo compares to the event horizon of a black hole, where gravity stretches time and nothing escapes.
The accompanying music video only deepens the spell, casting Kleo in a dreamscape where love blurs the line between fantasy and memory. It’s a visual companion that complements her songwriting style—atmospheric, emotionally honest, and always teetering on the edge of the mystical.
Having spent much of 2024 in the studio, Kleo now re-emerges with a more refined and spiritually attuned sound. Drawing inspiration from Vedic philosophy, Transcendental Meditation, and the invisible threads of cosmic synchronicity, she crafts music that fuses the metaphysical with the deeply personal. Her songwriting often feels like a dream sequence—balancing cinematic storytelling with the honesty of lived emotion.
Kleo reaffirms her presence as one unafraid to blur the boundaries between romance and transcendence, longing and surrender.
Photography Credit: André Hansen
LUNA: Thank you for talking to Luna. Our readers would love to get to know you and your music more. For any readers who aren’t familiar with you yet, what inspires your artistic style and sound?
KLEO: I'm a very spiritual person, and I've been practicing Transcendental Meditation for eight years now. That practice has naturally started to seep into my music. While I wouldn’t necessarily label my sound as 'spiritual,' it’s definitely taken on a more cinematic quality—something film-like and melancholic. It's also deeply influenced by the traditional songwriting styles of the 1970s. If I had to describe it, I'd say it's introspective, cinematic and rooted in deep pop.
LUNA: Are there particular moods or themes you find yourself gravitating towards when writing? How do you channel these into your music?
KLEO: I think music has a profound ability to permeate everything—it can completely transform a space. For me, creating music is about tapping into some kind of inner guidance. That might sound a bit strange, but it really feels like I’m simply calling in whatever wants to come through. Often, that turns out to be something melancholic. Still, I always try to anchor it to a specific scene or vibration—almost like scoring a moment in a film. That helps me narrow down what I’m writing about and stay connected to a certain emotional thread.
LUNA: You just released your newest single “Everything Everywhere at Once.” What is the inspiration behind the song and what themes or emotions do you explore?
KLEO: I had been listening to Mallrat a lot around the time I wrote that song. I remember sitting in my kitchen with my guitar, experimenting with some kind of Bon Iver-inspired open tuning I’d looked up. I’d also been really inspired by these conversations about quantum physics—how two particles, even far apart, can still be connected. That concept really stuck with me. Around the same time, I listened to a podcast about supermassive black holes and the event horizon—the edge where time stretches and distorts. If you were standing at the border of a black hole and looking back at Earth, you’d see everything—its becoming and its passing—all at once.
That idea of every potential existing in a single moment feels a lot like falling in love to me. I was actually in a phase where I was trying to call love into my life by writing about it as if it had already happened. It was a kind of conjuring—like planting a seed, or creating an inception-style moment. I kept returning to these dreamlike images of cars floating, time standing still—trying to capture what it might feel like to suspend reality in a single, transformative instant.
LUNA: What do you love most about this song? Is there like a specific lyric or message that stands out to you? What excites you the most about “Everything Everywhere at Once?”
KLEO: For me, it's not just about the lyrics—it's also deeply rooted in the arrangement of the music itself. I was listening to “Kiss from a Rose” by Seal from the 90s, and I was really struck by those medieval-inspired backing vocals in the intro. That sound stayed with me, and I wanted to bring a similar feeling into the pre-chorus. I was also heavily inspired by film scores—especially the emotional depth and tension in the Oppenheimer soundtrack, and of course, Hans Zimmer. But I’m especially a huge fan of Thomas Newman. His soundtracks have this way of painting emotion in such a subtle but vivid way, and that’s something I really aspired to capture, particularly with the strings in the song.
If I had to choose a favorite lyric, it would be from the pre-chorus—that was actually the first part of the song I wrote. It starts by listing these surreal images of the surroundings: 'cars are floating, planets turning'—that sort of thing. I love that section because it lays everything out with this graphic, cinematic detail. It’s where the whole atmosphere of the song really begins.
LUNA: The accompanying music video captures fleeting, magical moments. What was your vision for the visual storytelling, and how was your experience filming the video?
KLEO: We were trying to convey this alien-like character arriving at Earth and falling in love, but realizing that she doesn't actually belong there. Earth is sort of a dream, in a sense, so that was the idea, and then we had this beautiful team of people working on it. But of course, it turns out a lot different. In the beginning, I actually envisioned a music video happening in the summertime, with the light coming in over the flowers. I'm a fairytale kind of girl, even growing up in the 90s.
It was just so much fun. It was all done in one day. I've been cocooning for two and a half years. I've been going through several collaborations with different producers, so it's been a really long process. We were just mixing and editing the record, doing the final vocals when we did this music video, so it felt like I almost wasn't ready for that extrovert part of the cycle of creating music, doing the visual universe for it and then releasing. It was really a lot of fun. It reignited my joy of doing all of this and releasing my music.
LUNA: This single marks your return after your debut EP I Love This Movie. How do you feel your sound or songwriting has evolved between then and now?
KLEO: I have fallen even more in love with pop music. I'm trying to deviate less from what I'm hearing, so I'm trying to honor exactly what it is. I wanted strings on the entire record, and that's what I got. I would definitely say the songwriting has turned more pop. Music-wise, mix-wise and arrangement-wise, it's a step towards the light and being seen more. Some of the choices are really explicit, like you have the electronic beat compared to real drums in my old tracks on the EP. Also, vocally, I've been doing a lot of opera since I got this amazing soprano teacher, and she took me through Wagner and other really gorgeous material, so I'm very influenced by that. Melodically, it’s more expansive and honing in on how we can make the range bigger.
LUNA: When you're not making music and you're in the studio, what do you do to help inspire your creativity?
KLEO: I just got back from LA—I was incredibly lucky to receive a generous grant that allowed me to stay in a house in Beachwood, right in Hollywood. For me, traveling isn’t just a physical journey; it’s always an inner transformation too. There's something about stepping into a new space that sparks a kind of soul-level metamorphosis—you can’t help but be changed in some way.
While I was there, I met some truly amazing people. Being around others who are on a similar frequency is so important to me—especially when we’re speaking in terms of energy, manifestation and creativity. I’m extremely sensitive and deeply affected by my surroundings. It’s taken me a while to really respect that part of myself, to understand how much I absorb from the people and places around me. That’s also why I’ve started embracing slower rhythms, like going to bed early, and just tuning into what my body and spirit need at the moment.
LUNA: “Everything Everywhere at Once” feels like the start of something new. What can listeners expect from this next chapter in your artistry?
KLEO: Even more explicit emotion. I'm releasing an album later and I'm trying to create a vulnerable, more open space for everyone to feel their emotions. I find that this time around, there are less blocks standing between me and the listener. It will be a more straight story, and in some ways, it will also be more risky, because it's more pop and there's less wrapping around the music.
LUNA: How are you feeling in this current era of your career and what does the rest of the year look like for you that you would like to share with Luna?
KLEO: Releasing more music is what's coming next. I'm also hoping to go back to LA come fall, and I'm just really, really excited. I feel like I've been cocooning or in a cave for such a long time, and I'm starting to recognize and reinvent who I am. I think that if you've taken a break for a long time, regaining trust in yourself and your choices, and feeling like you're supposed to do what you're doing, and regaining trust in that, it's an ongoing process for me.
