Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - Ruin: It’s Not Just Music Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns this year with Ruin: It’s Not Just Music, a new studio album that marks one of the most decisive statements in her creative trajectory.

Across the past decade, KAS has established herself as a singular voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical composition and immersive sound design. Her new album Ruin: It’s Not Just Music arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the centre of its architecture and revealing a more confrontational, embodied dimension of KAS’s musical language.

The first single, Ruin, arrives May 22, with the full album released October 2 via SOMEONE SPECIAL, the new label co-founded by KAS.

Where much of her earlier work explored harmonic environments, the forthcoming album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments, motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her earlier catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognisably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind.

For listeners who first encountered KAS through the glowing synthesis of Ears (2016) or the intricate experimental pop of The Kid (2017), this direction may initially feel surprising, though the shift has quietly unfolded over several years. Her practice has steadily expanded beyond expectations placed upon experimental electronic artists, moving between orchestral composition, audiovisual installations, film scoring and large-scale commissions while retaining the unmistakable sonic signature that defines her work.

The 2022 albums I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon and Let’s Turn It Into Sound explored deeply immersive approaches to composition, expanding her reputation for constructing detailed sonic ecosystems while continuing to blur the lines between experimental electronics and contemporary pop structures. More recent releases, including the rhythm-oriented electronic album Gush (2025) and the orchestral-leaning Thoughts on the Future (2025), further underscored the breadth of her practice.

Her collaborators and creative partners have ranged from Patti Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Danny Elfman, Tycho, Glass Beams, RY X, Caribou, Four Tet, Reggie Watts and Max Richter, while her compositions have appeared in projects with Apple, Chanel, Meow Wolf, the BBC Orchestra, and major film and television productions.

On Ruin: It’s Not Just Music, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass and dancefloor-focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS’s work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.