There’s a peculiar thrill in watching destruction dress up for the camera for Halloween. Staytus walks into that frame like a fever breaking: eyes glassy, voice split between confession and command. Kiss N Tell doesn’t whisper its title so much as exhale it through clenched teeth; a pop exorcism scorched in studio fluorescence.
Staytus sings from a place where temptation has already won. Her tone is velvet over razorwire, tracing the outline of a bruise that might also be a kiss. You can hear the influence of the great unhinged women of industrial and grunge past, but she isn’t paying homage—she’s setting a fuse. Each verse is a match head. Each chorus a flare that lights up the wreckage.
Produced by Grammy-winner Mikal Blue, the track sounds like it’s been pressed through a thousand volts of desire and regret. Drums from Jeff Friedl slam like doors in an expensive hotel where no one’s supposed to be fighting. Anthony Laurie’s guitar lurches and claws, its feedback curving like smoke in a locked room. Everything feels both too close and far away at once, as if the microphones themselves are complicit in the secret.
Kiss N’ Tell lands like a diary entry written with a broken nail. The song moves through obsession’s alleyways with cinematic precision: the pulse of a red light, the hiss of breath against glass. Friedl’s drumming gives it bones; Blue’s production gives it blood. By the final refrain, it feels less like a track and more like an invocation—the kind of thing you hear right before the mirror fogs over.
“‘Kiss N Tell’ is about temptation and consequence—the things we hide, the lies we tell ourselves, and the chaos that comes from wanting too much,” says Staytus. “It’s confessional and destructive at the same time. I wanted it to feel dangerous and beautiful, like the moment before everything falls apart.”
The accompanying video, directed, filmed, and edited by Jessica Christian, pulls the listener straight into Staytus’s ritual. Shot inside Revolver Recording Studio, it’s all dim bulbs, cables like veins, and the tense choreography of creation. You can almost feel the air thicken as Staytus leans into the mic, eyes fixed, voice clawing its way out. It’s part séance, part studio diary – proof that performance and possession can be the same act.
Visually, the image of Staytus with the butterfly gag on her cover recalls Silence of the Lambs (or a myriad of MK Ultra rabbit holes), but also every moment when metamorphosis and repression become the same act. The butterfly is pinned. The girl is not. She’s alive, maybe too alive, in that dangerous way music occasionally allows.
Watch the video for Kiss N Tell below:
Kiss N Tell is about what happens after you lose it…and decide that maybe that’s liberation. It’s a confession sung from the wreck of a beautiful crime. In the end, you can almost see the lipstick print on the studio wall, proof that passion leaves evidence. Staytus has made something volatile: music that sounds like an argument with yourself that ends in applause.
Listen below:
Follow Staytus:
Or via: