Ashnikko talks misogyny and her acid-fairy dreamland
Ashnikko by Vasso Vu: via Inside Out Music
This article was originally published for CHECK-OUT Magazine, find it here.
At 25-years-old, ASHNIKKO is dominating music. Her enthralling grip on the industry comes in the form of brazen lyrics that snap defiantly between sexual intimacy and red-hot chaos. Duality is at the heart of her behemoth mixtape, DEMIDEVIL, that beats to a strong feminist pulse; rowdy electro-metal sounds alongside extroverted pop bangers which celebrate female tenacity. “A demidevil is half devil, half human. My human side is emotional and takes accountability for me being a bit of a fuck-up sometimes. Whereas my devil side – it’s just angry,” explains the singer. “I feel like as I mature, I become less heated and more introspective.” Written some years apart, the tracklist chronicles gritty subjects like lost love through catchy, pounding trap beats and punchy one-liners. In brief, it’s an unfiltered compendium on reality.
On the contrary, Ashnikko herself boasts an affinity for the make-believe. She swishes Smurf-blue hair, mythical costumes and, on occasion, entwines herself in virtual octopus tentacles. As a child, in her home state of North Carolina, the singer would construct fairy houses with her mother, commanding a love for fantasy that still seeps through the angst of her darker personas. Ashnikko’s upcoming livestream, her first entire mixtape performance in fact, harks back to that saccharine utopia; a secret garden where ruby-topped toadstools spawn and pixies revel in hazy woodland. When the concert airs this Friday, we can expect “an absolute mushroom forest acid fairy experience,” she promises.
When you think of daisies, delicate flowers usually spring to mind, as opposed to an 8ft tyrannical matriarch wearing latex and glass platform heels. In Ashnikko’s wild world, Daisy is both the name of a bratty character and her eponymous theme song that has spread across TikTok with viral velocity, totalling 88-thousand video features to date. “Daisy wears blue diamonds, and she sits on top of buildings watching the city, like a gargoyle, then leaves behind daisies as a calling card after she attacks,” she explains, bringing the song to life with a superheroine image. This crack-the-whip track introduces us to her mixtape with an audacious hip-hop flow. The line “being a bitch is my kink” sets an explicit bar for songs to follow while flipping submissive stereotypes of women upside down. It’s the song you play when you need an electric jolt of vanity – a bad bitch anthem. In a similar blood-pumping vein, Deal With It (feat. Kelis), pours pent-up fury from a failed relationship. This time it plays out a peppy major key that makes you want to dance in a rebellious frenzy. Perhaps its most memorable feature: the audible whirr of a vibrator that follows the lyric “I don’t need a man I need a rabbit” – and no, Ashnikko doesn’t mean the fluffy kind.
As much as these songs are hinged on zero-fucks sass, a vulnerability shines through DEMIDEVIL. Behind her glimmering success, Ashnikko is still figuring out life. In our interview, the real person behind the loud personality, Ashton Casey, is softly-spoken and mature. She answers at a measured pace, not the bouncing high-octane intensity that Ashnikko exudes. “She's me, I'm her. I just can't be her all the time because she has too much energy – I'm still working on that. I'll get back to you on what it takes to stay grounded because sometimes I'm very much up in the clouds,” she says, as she fathoms how to clean up the plant pot spillage that her dog, Lady Wednesday, caused before the Zoom call. When she’s not causing a musical ricochet, Ashnikko is pleasantly ordinary – spending her time baking, making crafts or pruning a pink fairycore garden in Animal Crossing. For a singer so blaring, the serenity of nature is where she finds peace, far away from the superficial toxicity surrounding social media. While TIKTOK has been a main catalyst for her internet fame, and she values her following greatly, she finds the digital age can feel overwhelming and disconnected.
Growing up across the globe, Ashnikko has traversed from Estonia, to Latvia, London and back to the USA – and in her travels she has learnt a lot. Love has taught her that not everything is idyllically sugar-coated and it’s a caution she hopes to reiterate to her younger audience: “I’ve been coming to terms with the fact that this fairytale, soulmate forever after is just an unattainable expectation and that you'll never be happy if that's the only thing you're looking for. Needing someone else to complete you is just a recipe for disaster and you should always be enriching yourself first,” she adds, finding strength in independence. Like romance, nothing is perfect. Even today the musician grapples with a perfectionist mindset, openly discussing dislike for her older songs. That said, the past informs our future and, for Ashnikko, it’s looking luminously bright. Just don’t patronise her as a ‘fresh, rising artist’. These are terms that she feels draw similarity to the expiration date of milk.
If you wondered which tune she’s most loving on the mixtape, the answer is Slumber Party with PRINCESS NOKIA - a sensual hyperpop hit that was originally a satirical poke at popular music. Revolving around a girls-only booty call it taps into a melody as silky as satin pyjamas. It also unlocks a refreshing openness around nudity, that is so often concealed in the music industry. The lyric “hentai boobies that excite me” might shock your conservative parents, but they work to normalise sex and bury any outdated stigmas. “It's important to talk about safe, pleasurable sex. Simply because I feel like the majority of people don’t place emphasis on pleasure, so I’ve put a focus on that – to learn about exploring your body and prioritising yourself,” the singer says. Of course, Ashnikko is no stranger to erotic tropes. Citing Clitoris! The Musical on her discography is one thing, but she’s also knitted a hat from dicks and crowned ‘butthole’ as her favourite word in the dictionary. But don’t take it the wrong way: “I never have men in mind when I talk about things like that.”
This same credo to stand out is strong in Ashnikko’s visual identity – with her halloween-cum-cyborg fashions, fantastical makeup and pigtails that give Rapunzel some competition. That’s what makes the singer so admirable; her unscathed sense of self, her inability to feel invalidated by criticism. If she’s not adorned in an eyeball dress, she’ll have her own eyeballs glued over in X-shaped prosthetics like Coraline or find herself slathered in slime for a promo video. It all traces back to a horror essence from her earlier days, like the gory music video for STUPID with its big American Pyscho meets girl-next-door vibes: “Blood is pretty isn’t it?” she asks rhetorically during our chat. In the DEMIDEVIL era, we see less guts and more robo-futurism. The mixtape’s cover art is rendered in CGI, nodding to anime and fantasy themes – where Ashnikko’s virtual avatar tames a flying dragon in the skies.
In a similar mystic dimension lies dream-pop musician, GRIMES, who has collaborated on raucous single Cry with Ashnikko. The two have polarising vocal styles – one ethereal, and the other roaring femme-rap – that fuse into a delightful oxymoron for the ears. During the remote, Instagram-initiated recording process Ashnikko spat out a vehement chorus, her voice tinged by real, unscripted emotion that even she struggles to recreate live. Never listening to male musicians before the age of 16, the self-professed “hot mess teenager” adored grainy Slipknot songs and emo-fave Evanescence as she grew, which explains her ballsy rock-adjacent voice. Another accolade for Ashnikko has been her mixtape re-recording of Avril Lavigne’s noughties bop Sk8r Boi into a modern-day fable on fuckboy rejection entitled L8r Boi: “I chose it because it’s such an iconic, nostalgic song. It played such a huge role in my musical discovery as a kid, almost like a soundtrack to my childhood.” As expected, the new version doesn’t have a happily ever after (can I make it any more obvious?) but it does make you want to hit the repeat button. Multiple times.
What Ashnikko does is shape-shift genre at her will. There are few other artists to compare; releasing songs that equally shock and satisfy in such extreme capacity. She crushes tradition right under her stiletto heel, stamping out societal flaws and raising awareness on prevailing issues: “It’s not my job to carry other people’s emotional burdens,” Ashnikko affirms. “But I know that the internet is obsessed with humiliating women, putting us under crazy amounts of scrutiny. I wish it wasn't like that. So I'm doing my part to call people out and make them question their own internalised misogyny.”
As she evolves her character and continues to gatecrash stuffy, patriarchal barriers, the singer will remain as music’s best kept hell-raiser. And until she achieves rightful world domination, you can find Ashnikko away with the fairies on Friday April 30th, in a delirious LSD-livestream extravaganza.