Father Koi by Lily Crandall.
Striking Gold with Father Koi
On the heels of a new EP release, The indie musician chats with COPY about her creative inspirations, from Grimes to The Beatles.
By Lily Crandall
5.12.2025
It’s the first 80-degree day of the year in New York, and even better, it’s a Saturday. Before the subway gets unrelentingly overheated, before electricity bills skyrocket, and before the sun’s intensity makes it hard to exist outside, we have this beautiful spring day. I spend it in a park with Kara Lu, the singer, songwriter, and producer known as Father Koi.
I was first introduced to her music while tapping through Instagram Stories. Someone I know had posted a track from her latest release, and the album artwork made me stop. On the cover of 2023’s everything is a dream, but it is your dream, Lu is on her knees, looking up at a bright light behind the camera—an open window, maybe. Whatever it was, it was enough to send me to Spotify to check it out. I hit play on the first track, “Feel for You,” and my interest was piqued. I listened to “Promise Ring” next, and then the next song and the one after that. I started listening and I didn’t stop. The album is a fun journey from hyperpop (“Feel for You”) to alt-rock (“New Years”) and back around again.
everything is a dream, but it is your dream by Father Koi
Last year, Lu dropped “locket,” which became my summer anthem. It’s a song for the yearners with a sharp outro that begs to be screamed. “Stick my finger in a socket / Your hair inside my locket / Stale heatwave all August / But didn't you say to drop it?” A full EP arrived last month called talk sweet, strike gold, which has lived in my daily rotation since. Each song feels expansive in its sound yet intimate in its lyrical content, with layered soundbites and soundscapes that all fit together in a way that’s exciting, unexpected, and deeply satisfying.
And now here we are, on the first warm day of the year, at a park in Bushwick with what seems to be everyone who lives within a mile radius, to chat about the music that I’ve spent the last year with.
Lu began playing piano at age six and is a rare example of someone who didn’t grow to resent it as she got older. She says, “There was a point when I was ten or so where I was just like, ‘I actually really like this.’ I feel like around that age, other kids explore other extracurriculars, but I just kept doing it.” She started writing her own songs in high school, around the time when she got into the big alternative names of the era: Melanie Martinez, Arctic Monkeys, Twenty One Pilots. She was not on Tumblr, but she was an avid user of Pandora Radio (we bonded over both finding a band we love, Voxtrot, on the streaming platform).
Lu started making music under the name Father Koi in college, after a group she was in nixed it to be their band name. The name Father Koi was inspired by Lorde. In a 2014 interview, Lorde explained that she took the title “Lord,” one full of grandeur and masculine expectation, and added an “e” to feminize it. “People see my name on posters and they expect to see like a guy, and then I show up,” Lu says, and laughs.
I ask Lu if she remembers the first song that stopped her in her tracks; one that made her say “whoa.”
“You know that song, ‘Tomorrow’ from Annie?” (I say, “Yes, of course”). “The progression is C major—C, C dominant, seven, F, F minor—that progression has stuck with me so much since I was a kid, and I’d recognize it everywhere… A lot of songs are written off that progression, like ‘Dear Prudence’ by the Beatles, and I just found myself very connected to it, I think because of the nostalgic quality of it.”
The Beatles come up a lot during our conversation, surprisingly (“suprisingly” due to the hyperpop-ness of Lu’s music). But I suppose the bands that shape our teenage years always make their way into our adult lives in one way or another. She says that the one single her high school band released is “Beatles-inspired”—but from “deep, deep cuts.” When I ask about her inspirations when she started making solo music, the Beatles come up again. Her first concert was Paul McCartney at Barclays Center when she was in high school: “I made a big sign that was some play on a Beatles song, and Paul McCartney pointed to it, which was crazy. And I have this jacket that I painted with the Sergeant Pepper’s album art on it that I wore.” The sign said “I am amazed!” (a play on the song, “Maybe I’m Amazed”). Her undergraduate thesis was a Freudian analysis of John Lennon.
Father Koi by Lily CrandallAnalyzing songs by the Beatles helped her understand chord progressions. She says, “I used to have this book of chord progressions of all the Beatles songs. I'm a big music theory head, so I'd go through this book, I'd analyze, I'd like Roman numeral-analyze all the chords, and then I guess by doing that, I unconsciously trained my brain.” The shift to electronic music came during the pandemic, when a friend put her on to hyperpop.
Lu is proud of the fact that she produces a lot of her music, but she hasn’t always felt that way. “I produced Late Afternoon National Anthem [her first record, released in 2020] by myself, and you can tell the production quality has gone up since then,” she tells me. “With that album, I wanted to produce, mix, and master it all by myself, and I hadn’t done that before, and I didn’t have anyone to teach me. But I’m glad it’s up there.”
We talk about “Promise Ring,” a standout track from the record that introduced me to her music, which she also produced. It’s infectious and clever and so, so catchy. The beat is mischievous and dark—fitting for lyrics that go from, “I've been walking up and down the block / Why are all your doors still locked? / You know that I just wanna be with you,” to, “And I don't care about the girls who came before / If you just tell me I'm your only we can leave them in the past / Or the trunk of my car will do just fine.”
She says, “That is one of my favorite songs I have made—just the way the chords go together. The bass line was inspired by ‘Oblivion’ by Grimes. I’m just really proud of the way I produced it.” The collaboration with Sofia Zarzuela (who now makes music under the name Veronica), she tells me, came about from an Instagram Story where Zarzuela was looking for someone to make a song with, and Lu reached out.
talk sweet, strike gold, Lu’s new EP, moves away from hyperpop and into something else. It’s tender and romantic, a lovely mix of guitar-heavy and layered synths. “I make electro-pop—that’s the closest thing I can think of,” she says, “But if I were to like go a bit deeper, I’d say I make alternative electro-pop that's kind of inspired by K-pop, J-pop, but also the Beatles.” She laughs—there they are again.
Each of the EP’s four tracks find Lu reaching out toward something, someone, just out of reach. In “locket,” she sings of an ex who maybe it wouldn’t be so bad going back to (reader, it would probably be bad). In “lovesong,” she laments, “Every day without you puts me six below / I miss you more than you could ever know.”
They feel like short stories transporting me deeper into the Father Koi universe. The sound of cassette tape clicking into place, a giggle, or a series of swirling, dreamy ambient sounds at the beginnings of the songs set the scene, before the instrumentation and vocals kick in. “It can’t just start with an arpeggio, it’s gotta start with a little sound bite,” she explains. The songs sound explosive and gigantic in a way that feels cinematic, confident, and extremely self-assured.
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Father Koi by Lily Crandall
“I think being a maximalist is just ingrained in me,” she says, “like the way I dress and the way my room looks. I think it has to do with nostalgia—a lot of kids are naturally maximalistic. They have a lot of trinkets in their rooms and they love colors and wear colorful clothing, so I feel like it’s a nod to childhood and enjoying the little things, enjoying life the way a kid would.”
— — —
Catch Father Koi on her first cross-country tour (tickets):
May 18: Brooklyn, NY @ The Broadway
May 25: Seattle, WA @ Baba Yaga
May 27: Portland, OR @ Shanghai Tunnel Bar
May 29: San Francisco, CA @ Neck of the Woods
June 7: Los Angeles, CA @ Permanent Records
Lu is proud of the fact that she produces a lot of her music, but she hasn’t always felt that way. “I produced Late Afternoon National Anthem [her first record, released in 2020] by myself, and you can tell the production quality has gone up since then,” she tells me. “With that album, I wanted to produce, mix, and master it all by myself, and I hadn’t done that before, and I didn’t have anyone to teach me. But I’m glad it’s up there.”
We talk about “Promise Ring,” a standout track from the record that introduced me to her music, which she also produced. It’s infectious and clever and so, so catchy. The beat is mischievous and dark—fitting for lyrics that go from, “I've been walking up and down the block / Why are all your doors still locked? / You know that I just wanna be with you,” to, “And I don't care about the girls who came before / If you just tell me I'm your only we can leave them in the past / Or the trunk of my car will do just fine.”
She says, “That is one of my favorite songs I have made—just the way the chords go together. The bass line was inspired by ‘Oblivion’ by Grimes. I’m just really proud of the way I produced it.” The collaboration with Sofia Zarzuela (who now makes music under the name Veronica), she tells me, came about from an Instagram Story where Zarzuela was looking for someone to make a song with, and Lu reached out.
talk sweet, strike gold, Lu’s new EP, moves away from hyperpop and into something else. It’s tender and romantic, a lovely mix of guitar-heavy and layered synths. “I make electro-pop—that’s the closest thing I can think of,” she says, “But if I were to like go a bit deeper, I’d say I make alternative electro-pop that's kind of inspired by K-pop, J-pop, but also the Beatles.” She laughs—there they are again.
Each of the EP’s four tracks find Lu reaching out toward something, someone, just out of reach. In “locket,” she sings of an ex who maybe it wouldn’t be so bad going back to (reader, it would probably be bad). In “lovesong,” she laments, “Every day without you puts me six below / I miss you more than you could ever know.”
They feel like short stories transporting me deeper into the Father Koi universe. The sound of cassette tape clicking into place, a giggle, or a series of swirling, dreamy ambient sounds at the beginnings of the songs set the scene, before the instrumentation and vocals kick in. “It can’t just start with an arpeggio, it’s gotta start with a little sound bite,” she explains. The songs sound explosive and gigantic in a way that feels cinematic, confident, and extremely self-assured.
Father Koi by Lily Crandall“I think being a maximalist is just ingrained in me,” she says, “like the way I dress and the way my room looks. I think it has to do with nostalgia—a lot of kids are naturally maximalistic. They have a lot of trinkets in their rooms and they love colors and wear colorful clothing, so I feel like it’s a nod to childhood and enjoying the little things, enjoying life the way a kid would.”
— — —
Catch Father Koi on her first cross-country tour (tickets):
May 18: Brooklyn, NY @ The Broadway
May 25: Seattle, WA @ Baba Yaga
May 27: Portland, OR @ Shanghai Tunnel Bar
May 29: San Francisco, CA @ Neck of the Woods
June 7: Los Angeles, CA @ Permanent Records