Into The Music
King Princess has always operated in multiple registers at once. She’s a pop artist and a rock kid and a producer’s kid who grew up in a Brooklyn recording studio absorbing everything. She’s queer and loud about it and has made that identity central to her work without ever treating it as a limitation. She can do a straightforward heartbreak song and she can do something strange and cinematic and she moves between those modes without announcing the transitions. That’s a harder thing to pull off than it sounds.
Mikaela Straus, which is the name on her birth certificate, was born in 1998 and spent her childhood at Mission Sound in Brooklyn, where her father Oliver Straus worked as a recording engineer. She absorbed production from the beginning, learning bass, guitar, piano, and drums before most people have decided what instrument they want to play. That background shows in everything she does: King Princess records don’t sound like an artist working with producers. They sound like someone who has already made all the important decisions before anyone else gets in the room.
She broke through with “1950” in 2018, a song about queer love that found the exact tone that a lot of people had been waiting for. It wasn’t coded or hedged. It was direct, emotional, musically impeccable. The song traveled fast, and King Princess was signed to Mark Ronson’s Zelig Records imprint at Columbia before the year was out. Her debut album Cheap Queen arrived in 2019 and held up the promise.
The work since then has been a process of expansion. Hold On Baby in 2022 pushed the arrangements further and found critical favor. Girl Violence, her third LP, arrived in September 2025 and showed an artist comfortable with her own idiosyncrasies, no longer reaching toward any particular sound and just being it. The tour behind that record has extended into 2026, with major dates through the spring and summer.
Now she’s announced something new, and it’s a left turn that also makes complete sense: she’ll make her theatrical debut as Lisa in the Off-Broadway premiere of Girl, Interrupted at New York’s Public Theater this spring. The production is a play with music featuring original songs by Aimee Mann, drawn largely from her 2021 album Queens of the Summer Hotel. Mann’s music is a good match for King Princess’s sensibility: emotionally precise, formally careful, not willing to let you off the hook. The production opens June 4 and runs through June 21.
The Lisa role is a good one for her. The character, made famous by Angelina Jolie in the 1999 film, is charismatic and difficult, someone who uses charm as both weapon and shield. King Princess has always had that quality in her public presence. She doesn’t perform warmth as a strategy. She just shows up, entirely herself, and that turns out to be enough.
She’s 27 and has already made records that matter, built a live following that clearly means something to the people in those rooms, and now she’s stepping onto a stage in a very different way. Whatever comes next, she’s earned the right to surprise you.