Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith returns this year with Ruin: Its 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 unique 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: Its 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, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of KASs musical language.

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

Where much of KASs 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 past 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 feel initially surprising, yet the shift has been quietly unfolding across the past several years. KASs practice has steadily expanded beyond the 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 (2022) and Lets Turn It Into Sound (2022) explored a deeply immersive approach to composition, expanded her reputation and instinct for constructing detailed sonic ecosystems while continuing to blur the lines between experimental electronics and contemporary pop structures. KASs most recent output has continued to widen that field including the rhythm oriented electronic album Gush (2025) and her return to more orchestral roots with Thoughts on the Future (2025). Together these releases underscored the breadth of her practice.

Her prolific 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: Its Not Just Music, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KASs 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.

On May 27th KAS will present a major performance at Londons Barbican Centre alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra, marking the ten-year anniversary of her landmark album Ears. The evening will trace the arc of her creative evolution while also introducing material from the new album.