MOTHICA: “My goal used to be selling out Wembley. Now I just want to wake up and enjoy the people I’m around in my everyday life”

This is not something McKenzie could have told Kerrang! had this interview happened a year or so ago. In truth, it’s not something she’s often been able to say all too easily since she was a teenager. Whether in her lyrics or her interviews as MOTHICA, McKenzie has pulled no punches when it comes to sharing her struggles.

During her first K! Cover Story in July 2024, she offered a candid account of her journey up to that point. “I’m shocked I survived half the things I did,” she said, starkly, having recounted surviving abuse at the hands of her youth pastor, a suicide attempt at age 15, battles with depression, anxiety and alcohol addiction, plus an incapacitating fear of flying and chronic stage fright. Somehow, she not only overcame all of that trauma but managed to channel it into a successful music career. With MOTHICA boasting a compellingly dark brand of alt.pop, she secured critical acclaim, millions of streams and collaborations and tours with the likes of Polyphia, Scene Queen, Coheed And Cambria, Papa Roach and Halestorm. The Hollywood version of this tragedy-to-triumph story would normally end there. Demons vanquished. Happy ending realised. Reality is rarely so generous.

“I went to rehab a year or something ago,” McKenzie begins. “All of the stuff behind the scenes was really weighing on me. I turned to drugs to cope with everything and, eventually, I just cracked.”

Not that it looked like that on the surface. In September 2024, she was riding high off the success of her third album Kissing Death and embarking on her first headline tour of Europe. By October she was not only cancelling her autumn tour dates in the States but also seeking professional help to shake a deepening addiction to pills. More on that later. Suffice to say, during this period, the thought occurred to her that while McKenzie would emerge from the 30-day programme intact, MOTHICA might not.

“I didn’t know if I wanted to do music anymore,” she reflects today.

With her life slowed down to a recuperative crawl, she started entertaining lots of different paths. Maybe she’d become a life-coach or motivational speaker. Maybe she’d do a TedTalk. Or write a book. Or a TV show. Hmm.

By the time 2025 rolled around, McKenzie was out of rehab but still very much picking up the pieces, and slowly started dabbling in writing songs. It was as the skies above her home turned black with hot ash from the LA fires in January that she hastily evacuated to Las Vegas. Among the personal effects she gathered into her car to save from possible destruction? A few wigs and a full-standing piece of taxidermy, naturally. “Maybe I could have picked some other better items to save,” she deadpans.

Her plan was two-fold.

1) Escape the flames raining down on her property.
2) Start recording some songs that addressed, in unflinching fashion, what she had been through.

“All of the emotions I had been stifling came out,” she reflects. “And it was angry.”

This, then, is how we arrive at her excellent new EP Somewhere In Between. Oddly, especially for an artist who almost called it quits a few months before, it started out as a 30-song double-album.

“It’s so me to be like, ‘I’m moving to the woods,’ and then say, ‘Now I have a double album, and I need eight music videos!’” she laughs, very much embracing her own contradictions.

“I was processing,” McKenzie continues. “I just had to get it all out. Not only does this EP mostly talk about drugs, addiction, stuff like that, but another thing I didn’t really process when I was in rehab was I went through this massive break-up with the love of my life. I’ve never written break-up songs or love songs, it’s always been about mental health or substances, or it’s disguised: it sounds like a love song, but it’s really about my true love, which is drugs, or romanticising death. I was processing both things and it ended up being 30-something songs.”

A full album, she explains, will eventually follow featuring more of this material, but up first are the five razor-sharp tracks that capture MOTHICA heavier and louder than ever before. Fans have already dubbed it her “ROCKICA” era. While McKenzie explains she’s not “usually a very ‘woo-woo’ spiritual person,” as a talented visual artist she has often said that she sees melodies in her head as much as she hears them. We already know what Somewhere In Between sounds like. It’s loud. It’s angry. But what does it look like to its creator?

“So there’s this flower called a blue thistle, it’s this weird blue-purple colour, and it has spikes on it,” she says. “I wanted to make songs that sounded like that flower.”

Google the blue thistle, then listen to the EP’s title-track – a bruised admission of what she’s been through and where she’s ended up. You quickly realise that she’s nailed her own brief.

‘A daydream and a guillotine / I live somewhere in between,’ she sings as the song switches gears from ambient grace to a full-on distorted exorcism.

With Pee-wee sitting beside her, McKenzie proceeds to explain how she got to that point. It’s time for her to unravel her unravelling…

As things spiralled, taking pills was no longer just a pre-flight routine, it was an aftershow norm. “It felt almost like having a glass of wine,” she remembers. “To me it was like, ‘Oh, I’m done with the day, I can take this.’

“I was taking these medications to function,” she continues. “Especially because I was sober, it was the first time I had to really sit with this complete lack of control in my life. I think addicts need to control themselves and their surroundings. Slowly, it became this everyday thing. It wasn’t until I tried to get off of it that I realised I had been completely addicted to these things. I tried to see a psychiatrist, but I’m an addict, and as much as I do have panic disorder, and I do probably have ADHD, I now know I can’t medicate myself for it in a healthy way. It took a lot of accepting that I might just have to face reality. And because I wasn’t doing it properly and going to a doctor, I didn’t know how to stop. I would quit cold turkey, and then I was going through withdrawals. It was so terrifying.”

McKenzie paints a bleak portrait of the time. She couldn’t read. She would have to get her friends to come over to her place to make butter noodles for her just so she could eat. In the end, she was so helpless she “felt like a toddler”. The difficulties of getting off the pills would even lead her straight back to them, which in one instance involved her accidentally trying a “counterfeit” tablet right before she left for her European tour. Laying in bed for 10 hours, her brain wouldn’t turn off. Her heart started beating so fast she called an ambulance. When the medic arrived, he told her it was a panic attack and nothing more, even advising her that she shouldn’t pull the plug on her tour.

“As heartless as that kind of was, and as terrible as it was, it actually did help me,” she reflects. “I probably would have not gone to Europe if he hadn’t said that. I was like, ‘Okay, if it’s all in my head, I can figure this out.’ I went on that European tour and, while I was on it, I was trying to wean myself off of those pills again, to the point of asking [people] to keep the bottle for me. It was not ideal to be meeting fans and I felt so bad, because people would be wanting to say how much I’ve helped them or inspired them. Meanwhile, I’m crying. I was walking through Amsterdam and it was beautiful, but I was so miserable. I was so upset with myself that I got to that point. It was really, really difficult. I was fully faking it ’til I made it.”

Surviving those shows was one thing, but the prospect of then going on a U.S. tour in the fall was too much. Something had to give.

“It was so, so scary to make that decision to cancel that tour, because I had people trying to convince me to do the 30-day treatment program, have two days off and then go on the tour,” she reflects. “But that was crazy. I needed to take all the layers off, be a human again, and think about what I wanted.”

The 30-day rehab would prove transformative. As McKenzie was put on medications to slowly wean her off pills without withdrawal symptoms, she planned other lives for herself, she avoided listening to any music and, she says, only fucked up once.

“I did, um, probably make the mistake of telling them all my music name,” she quips. “There was a DJ that was in there and he was trying to get me on a track. And I was like, ‘This is not the time!’”

Eventually, she resolved that life as MOTHICA could continue. She would just require a new mindset.

“I just needed to not let it take me down to the depths of despair and remember that teenage version of myself that started doing this and the joy,” she explains. “One of the worst qualities in someone is when they’re jaded and bitter, and I think to cope with that, I turned to substances. Now it’s like I’m returning to that childlike wonder and not letting everything feel like the end of the world to me.”

This outlook also applies to her own recent past. During the Vegas sessions, she could reflect on her experiences from a safer distance – a song like Weapon now seeming more like a survival scar than a mortal wound. Not that it’s an easy listen.

“It’s my red flag song, for sure,” she nods. “I was reflecting on the uglier sides of myself. I’ve heard that addicts almost have this searchlight – they’re always looking for ‘that thing’. When you give up drugs or whatever, it becomes something else. For me, it became validation from men. I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I’ve been manipulative, and I’ve used people to feel better about myself because I have this deep wound inside me.’ It was like, ‘Oof, I’m the female manipulator in that song.’ That’s something no-one wants to portray, the darker sides of themselves. I’ve always had this big heart, this heavy heart, and everything feels so intense. When you’re not taking care of yourself, that can be weaponised against people and yourself.”

The EP is full of what McKenzie labels ‘Ooh, I don’t know if I should be saying that’ moments, with Bullet another prime candidate, a song riddled with religious imagery that captures her reaching a stark ultimatum in the chorus. ‘It’s better than a bullet in my head / Better than a noose around my neck,’ she reasons. ‘The lesser of two evils could be one hell of a time / Guess I’ll sit back and enjoy the ride for one last time.’

“It’s almost me rationalising my relapse to myself,” she explains. “When you’re dependent on something, you’re like, ‘Well, I want to die, but the lesser of two evils is relapsing, so I guess I’ll do that.’ It’s funny with all of these songs, I didn’t try to make religious imagery a theme, but of course, it just came out that way. It’s more I think other people would see things as a sin. I was never Catholic, but I’m always drawn to the Catholic Church. I mean, they have the best merch design in the game with the stained glass windows, rosaries and blood…”

But before you pre-order her Pope Leo XIV merch capsule – and while we’re on the topic of religious imagery – it’s worth noting that falling back in love with MOTHICA and dealing with a painful past was just the start of her journey back. There were still other crosses to bear…

The peculiar problem was that someone else was, too. Not only was McKenzie dealing with an uncaring music industry while she was re-establishing herself as an artist, MOTHICA also had a doppelgänger. Or, perhaps more accurately, a mothelgänger. It’s what prompted her to pen Somewhere In Between’s lead single Evergreen Misery – a venomous diss track triangulated, musically, between Evanescence, Banks and Halsey. In it she calls out a ‘synthetic imposter’ of an artist who uses MOTHICA as a ‘stepping stone’. Will the person on the receiving end of this broadside know who they are when they hear it?

“If they’re listening, yeah,” McKenzie says, bluntly. “And that was such a specific occurrence, it was very bizarre. My trauma became a commodity. This person that maybe hadn’t had a lot of experiences with that saw that it connected with people and then started imitating my story in a weird way. They wanted to have this crazy backstory, but it wasn’t true. That was just so weird. Then it turned into taking in lyrics of mine and putting it into their own stuff, or even copying the visuals. I would talk about my youth pastor story, and then they would mysteriously come up with their own replica. It was watching someone copy the wrong things, like, ‘Why do you want to have this?’”

Despite McKenzie delivering a substantial lyrical smackdown, listen closely and you’ll hear a subtle shift, as well. There’s anger, yes, but also weapons-grade sarcasm.

“I wanted to be a little cheeky,” she grins. “I’m [basically saying], ‘My misery is evergreen, don’t worry, I have a bottomless pit of despair you can pull from.’”

This ability to laugh is indicative of a new glass-half-full approach she’s trialling these days. As MOTHICA, McKenzie has always dealt with death and, much more than most, been conscious of trying to avoid glamorising it in the process.

“It’s so tricky because I grew up on artists that were in complete turmoil and despair,” she observes. “[Death] is obviously the easy way out. The challenge is, how do you have a positive message and it not be cheesy? That’s been my biggest thing in my music, because I do think the lyrics you listen to are things that you reflect on the outside. You don’t want to be listening to music that’s doubling down on these thoughts and beliefs that could lead to self-harm or terrible self-image.”

Save Your Roses is the best realisation of this yet. It was inspired by a fan that came up to McKenzie on her European tour and told her that “people should get their flowers while they’re still alive”. It torpedoed the fatalistic streak in the singer.

“Save Your Roses is me thinking, ‘What does it look like if I, as someone who always thought I was gonna die young, actually lives a full, beautiful life?’ If you write music, it’s often your innermost thoughts, your darkest thoughts, your most self-pitying thoughts. But when I put out a song, I want to have some silver lining, some resolution to it. When I’m in a dark place, it’s hard for me to listen to sad songs anymore. I have to listen to Fergie or something…”

Not only has she written about silver linings, she’s also experienced them, too. Despite the dunderheaded comments from people that said she would have to “crawl back to relevancy”, on Saturday, June 14, 2025, MOTHICA returned to the live stage in a grand fashion at Download.

“When I got to play Download, I was like, ‘Oh, wow, I got through it, I’m a normal human again,’” she smiles. “It was a reminder that I’m still capable of this.”

The very next day she played a headline set at London’s O2 Islington Academy where she stayed behind to meet every single person in the venue, shaking hands for two hours straight. Once upon a time she would have ended a night like that – one charged with emotion – by taking some pills. But nowadays?

“It’s funny, I actually listen to British people talk about boring history facts to sleep,” she chuckles. “That’s my way: I have to listen to a British voice to fall asleep. After expending that much energy playing a show and talking to people, that is totally what I’m listening to: what it was like in a brothel in the Victorian period.”

Having celebrated her 30th birthday (or 300th if you were in attendance at her vampire-themed party) last year, she has emerged older, wiser, stronger and healthier, especially having recorded Somewhere In Between.

“Luckily, I feel like I got all of those feelings out,” she explains. “I do have a lot more structure and stability. The biggest thing that has changed in my life has been not taking myself too seriously. I’m someone that so easily feels like everything’s bleak and that the world’s going to shit. Everything’s bad, nothing matters. But there’s this other side of that where it turns into, ‘Nothing matters, with a rainbow on top of it.’ A sense of humour, and laughing, is my ultimate goal. Not taking myself too seriously has changed my life. My goal used to be, ‘I want to play Wembley Arena and sell it out.’ Now my goal is, ‘Wake up and enjoy the people I’m around in my everyday life.’”

At home in LA, she’s building a new life with this in mind. She frequents local comedy clubs. She hosts dinner parties. She is always on the look-out for more hobbies to develop the ‘McKenzie’ part of her.

“The biggest difference between MOTHICA and McKenzie?” she ponders, unprompted. “Sadly, it’s that MOTHICA wears a wig and a corset and McKenzie dresses like a 12-year-old boy.”

It’s not 2024 anymore. In 2026, McKenzie has hope. She has a sense of humour as a suit of armour. And, of course, she has Pee-wee.

“He gets me out of the house in the morning because he wasn’t potty trained when I got him,” she smiles, looking at the lil’ ball of fur as our conversation comes to an end. “As a musician, it’s very easy for me to not leave my house or see people for days. Nowadays I’m outside, the sun is on me and I’m walking. I never thought I would be able to be responsible for something else. It gives you such confidence when you can keep something alive. That’s a big thing. Like I said earlier, I can’t just go around my apartment overthinking and feeling bad for myself.”

She issues one last smile.

“My whole mental capacity is taken up by improvising songs for my dog and telling him how tiny he is and how he’s getting smaller every day.”

MOTHICA’s new EP Somewhere In Between is released on February 20 via SharpTone.

If you have been affected by anything in this piece, please contact Samaritans – you can phone 116 123 for free, or email jo@samaritans.org.

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