Q&A: Starling Evolves Their Sound in New EP “Forgive Me,” Share Lead Single “I Can Be Convinced”
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY KIMBERLY KAPELA ☆
Photography Credit: Liam Jones
A LOVE LETTER TO THE UNRAVELED — Los Angeles alt-rock band Starling has announced their long-awaited new EP, Forgive Me, due out June 27. Heralding the announcement is “I Can Be Convinced,” a searing, emotionally raw track that strays from the band’s hazy dreamscapes in favor of something heavier—more volatile, yet no less tender. Driven by blistering hi-hats, jagged guitar lines, and Kasha Souter Willett’s seductive, sauntering vocals, the track spirals with intention into a beautifully unhinged sonic chaos. It’s both a departure and an evolution—a glimpse into a band becoming more sure of themselves by leaning into discomfort.
With roots deep in the LA underground, Starling has always resisted easy categorization. Their sound is a collision of grunge and shoegaze, filtered through an indie songwriter’s lens. It’s music steeped in contradiction: soft and heavy, restless and intimate, aching yet restrained.
Forgive Me continues to trace that yearning, exploring confusion, frustration, love, and loss in a deeply DIY spirit. Written over the course of a year and recorded in a patchwork of sheds, apartments, and garages across LA, the EP is a portrait of a band in flux—embracing imperfections, building catharsis from scraps.
“I was exploring those emotions of grief and loss, and reflecting on the times I've gone through that, and also trying to help a friend through that, but not really knowing how,” Willett says. “For the recording process, we recorded it last summer and it was hot, and we were doing it in sheds and garages in the most DIY way possible. I think there was a lot of passion and heat, metaphorically and literally, that was happening for us at that time, just in that process that ended up in the recording.”
The visual for “I Can Be Convinced,” directed by longtime friend David Milan Kelly, brings a surreal and haunting elegance to the song’s emotional depth. Featuring an ensemble of ballerinas who dance in eerie juxtaposition to the song’s grit, the video pulses with both beauty and tension.
As they continue to blur genre lines and push their sound into heavier, more unruly territory, Starling is rising as one of LA’s most exciting underground acts. Vulnerable, cathartic and sonically daring, Forgive Me is a statement of intent—and a beautifully flawed offering from a band learning to live with the noise.
Photography Credit: Liam Jones
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?
KASHA: For me, I think a lot about what's going on in the local scene in LA. I grew up going to a lot of punk shows downtown. It's not necessarily the kind of music we make, but I've always been inspired by that, also, just books and nature and just little pieces of art in the day are inspiring to me.
LUNA: Are there particular moods or themes you find yourself gravitating towards when writing and performing? How do you channel these into your music?
GRACE: We all pull inspiration from different places and bring it to Starling, which is fun. I feel like especially as we started writing more together, it's really fun to see how each person's influences weave and find their way into what we make.
KASHA: I think we channel moodiness. The songs are emotional, so it's easier for me to write the lyrics that tap into that. I think everyone else is tapping in with me, but it's easy just to get in a zone of drama when you're on stage.
LUNA: You just released your newest single “I Can Be Convinced” which is a sneak peek into your upcoming EP Forgive Me. How does this set the tone for the rest of the EP and why choose this as one of the lead singles from the project?
KASHA: It's upbeat. It’s very hooky and feel good. I think it's the most straightforward song in a lot of ways. And as far as the rest of the record goes, there's a lot of longer ones and maybe some slower ones.
GITAI: I think thematically also, there's a lot of yearning. “I Can Be Convinced” opens up into deeper cuts. I feel like this one is a nice doorway into the rest of the songs.
GRACE: It's a nice little juicy piece of bait to throw on the line then reel you in for, for the other fun stuff.
LUNA: “I Can Be Convinced” also has an accompanying music video. What was the inspiration behind the video and how was your experience filming it?
KASHA: My friend David [Millan Kelly] produced, directed and edited it. He's been a close friend of ours for a couple years now, and we've been wanting to do something together. When we decided this was the lead single, we got together, and he made a treatment for it, and it has all these beautiful visuals with the white drapes and the dancers. He had Renaissance paintings, so it's what the dancers were doing. They were imitating those. We filmed it over a weekend. It was intense because we're used to working hard with music, but the film industry is a whole different beast, so being on set all day was new for some of us. Some of us have other experiences in it, but it was a really good vibe the whole time. Everyone was working together, pulling all the resources we had to make it happen with a low budget that we had. We just flowed with it, and it fell into place and it all ended up reflecting really well on the mood and vibe of the song itself.
LUNA: What central themes or emotions were you exploring while writing Forgive Me—whether personal, relational or existential?
KASHA: A lot of the songs were written in the beginning of 2024. At that time, I had a couple friends who lost some of their very close friends—young people to tragic situations. You see that a lot in the art world, so I was exploring those emotions of grief and loss, and reflecting on the times I've gone through that, and also trying to help a friend through that, but not really knowing how. I also wanted to write more love songs, so I did, and then brought them into the band, and then we explored those feelings together and went through the writing process. For the recording process, we recorded it last summer and it was hot, and we were doing it in sheds and garages in the most DIY way possible. I think there was a lot of passion and heat, metaphorically and literally, that was happening for us at that time, just in that process that ended up in the recording.
LUNA: I would love to touch on the creative process more. Can you walk us through the creative process behind Forgive Me? How did the songs evolve from the initial idea to its final version?
GITAI: Kasha shared demos with us as we learned to play the songs live, and then what ended up in the studio recording was this sort of hybrid of what we had been playing live and some more production that had gone on between Erik and Kasha. What you get in the recordings is definitely this combination of the two worlds of Starling shows and studio productions. It's also a bridge between the first EP we put out and songs we're currently writing altogether. It documents the transition from the extremely surreal EP we put out last August and all in the current material that we're working on.
KASHA: It's a little more grounded. This started as a solo project and it's an equal partnership situation now, but when those songs were being written, it was still the transition. This is our final dipping the toe and this being a fully evolved band.
ERIK: We’re saying ‘forgive me’ because we’re still trying to figure things out, so forgive the listener and forgive us. We’re still in purgatory.
LUNA: What’s something you learned about yourselves as a band—or as individuals—during the creation of this EP?
GRACE: It's really fun for me, because I had been really into music when I was younger, and I was friends with Kasha before I was just the bassist of Starling. It's been really fun to revisit being a musician and getting back into that through working in Starling, working on this project, and it's been really a fun personal journey of re-becoming a musician through Kasha’s encouragement and being in a band again.
KASHA: I think for me, just letting go is so vital to growing. As I touched on earlier, the fact that this is now an equal partnership band and not my solo project has been a rewarding transition. I'm a little controlling of a person, so in something that's the most precious to me, which is music, it's been beneficial for my art and my personal life to experience letting go and then seeing how that can be fruitful.
LUNA: From recording to artwork, Forgive Me was largely self-made with the help of close friends. What were the challenges and rewards of keeping things so DIY?
ERIK: I personally don't know how to do anything otherwise. I've only ever done things DIY because I can't afford studio time and I don't want to. I think it leaves you somewhat restricted. You have to work with what you got. I don't know if that's totally true, because honestly, the greatest instrument is the computer, and you can basically do anything you want with that. Recording Forgive Me was mostly hanging out in one of two sheds and talking about what we're going to do next, and then doing it, and then eating lunch and doing it again the next week. It wasn't very glamorous at all. We were just trying to get things done.
KASHA: We would love to record in the studio at some point, but it's just like what Erik said, you do what you can with the resources you have available, and you make shit happen if you want to do something.
LUNA: Do you have a personal favorite song on the EP— one that feels closest to your heart or most revealing of who Starling is right now?
GITAI: “Slow Down,” which no one has heard yet. You may have heard it at our shows. I think that one instinctively feels like it has so much range within one song.
KASHA: Mine is the opening track, “Quiet,” because it has a lot going on, and it gets you in your feels and got me in my feels when I wrote it, and continues to do so every time we play it.
ERIK: That's also my favorite. That's my favorite because I scored strings for it, and it was cool hearing people play that.
GRACE: “My Love” was the first song where I felt like I cooked here, but I do genuinely think in that arc of being like, what am I personally bringing to Starling? That was one of the first moments where I was like that's what it is.
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?
KASHA: Feeling good. Want to be touring more. I think we're just trying to be on the road as much as possible, so prioritizing that.
GRACE: With Forgive Me on the horizon, I feel like we're all in this place that it feels like we're all pregnant and ready to give birth to this. It's very vulnerable and strange, but really exciting at the same time.
