Hi, I’m KROY and I’m a musical artist, writer and creative director from Montreal, Canada. KROY is actually the name of my project, but over the years my personal and creative identities have almost completely merged.
I’ve been making music for over a decade, and have identified as a musician for probably more than twenty years. I started my *career* when I was cast in a Cirque du Soleil show at age 12 and proceeded to be one of their main characters and singers for the following two years, touring all over the world.
Following that time of my life, I studied Orchestral Composition as well as Jazz Vocals and contemporary production and then took what I learned and ran with it. I’ve been writing and producing ever since, and more recently have been scoring films and videogames.
Throughout all of this, I’ve collected memories and challenges in the form of songs. I’ve just released my second album MILITIA which is somewhat of a collection of a decade of writing on napkins and in voice memos and in unsent texts, working with a bunch of collaborators, from coast to coast, some of them close to home, and others I met online and don’t think I’ve ever met IRL.
I think I’m very much a creature of the internet, and being able to work remotely has been so beneficial for me. I have the attention span of a puppy and need to be able to do a thousand things at once. This record is kind of a testament to that.
It was very hard for me to prioritise this solo work that I do, and so this is one of the reasons this album took so long to finish. I was working on it at night, in the mornings, when I was supposed to rest from my other projects. And in the end, I feel it is a very good representation of the way I like to move. A hundred projects at once, full speed ahead.
MILITIA is about betrayal. I’m pretty sure this is the most common theme in my work – betrayal and deception. I think it’s because I like to see the best in people and I am completely blind to red flags, which makes it so that I am often blindsided and feeling backstabbed.
It affects me very much because I really hate to be wronged and to be wrong about people. I often don’t talk much about it, so the only way I’m able to get things off my chest is to write songs.
I’m inspired by sad music but also very much by architecture and machinery as well as marine biology. I get so awestruck by things that society has tried to teach us are normal. (ROBOTIC SURGERY???? WIFI????? HELLO????) I think it may be my overthinking and hyperfocus that allows me to look at certain things from all angles and to find the poetry in them and to let them infuse what I do.
Up next I’ll be working with KUKA arms some more, navigating movement and robotic assisted music production and performance. I also want to make sure it doesn’t take me another 8 years before I release another record. So I want to get back in the studio (my living room) sooner rather than later and start the process of a new chapter already.
But for now, you can listen to my album that I quite literally put my blood, sweat and tears into.
Listen to MILITIA below, and stream it elsewhere here.
