Canadian artist Kinnie Starr returns on September 23 with DestroyHer, her tenth album and first full-length release in eight years, arriving through her independent label Violet Inch Records.
Recorded and shaped from Haida Gwaii, DestroyHer brings together ten interconnected personal and political songs exploring grief, resistance, consumption, resource extraction, technological dependency and colonial power. It is a record where personal loss continually opens into larger questions about how people relate to each other and the natural world.
The album’s first glimpse came through “DESTROYER”, a bass-and-guitar-driven track confronting a culture built around shopping, competition, judgement, expansion and destruction.
The song originated from a rough jam found among Starr’s Logic 9 sessions while she was working on more developed material. Its unfinished beginnings ultimately suited the subject matter, becoming part of a wider collection of songs written following the fentanyl-related death of Starr’s younger brother.
“My thesis is that we burn each other as we burn the land and water,” Starr says.
That connection between personal grief and environmental destruction continues through “Waters: Redux”, a new version of Starr’s 2014 song featuring Julian Taylor.
The original track featured Haida rapper Ja$e El Niño (Gaagwiis), now President of the Council of the Haida Nation. For the new version, longtime collaborator Lin Gardiner has created a new mix, Taylor contributes a new verse, and Starr has rewritten the second verse.
The song also incorporates Neil Young speaking about the disproportionate effects of petrochemical development on Indigenous lands, waters and communities.
For Starr, revisiting the song more than a decade after its original release has brought its environmental concerns into an increasingly urgent present. Her updated lyrics reference communities facing destructive fire seasons, while Taylor’s contribution brings a contrasting tenderness to the track.
“Waters: Redux has now been re-released with an updated second verse that drives home the emergency of the Anthropocene,” Starr says. “I feature Julian Taylor in the opening verse for his sweet and gentle love of waters as a way to soften the aggression of my own verse. Water is LIFE.”
That tension between tenderness and confrontation sits at the heart of DestroyHer.
Since the release of 2018’s Feed the Fire, Starr has experienced the deaths of both her younger brother and, soon afterward, her father. Those losses form an important emotional thread through the album, but DestroyHer also makes room for humour, family, community, resilience and the possibility of repair.
Across the record, Starr tackles different aspects of the world around her. “Rule of Land 1997” confronts colonial assumptions surrounding written history through the landmark Delgamuukw ruling, while “Put The Phone Down” turns humour towards technological dependency.
“Dirty Oil Industry” and “This is GCide” examine extraction, consumption and shopping as forms of emotional anaesthesia, while other songs address sibling loss, stigma and enduring love.
The album’s release has been unfolding across a solstice-to-equinox arc, with DestroyHer arriving on September 23. That movement through the seasons mirrors the record’s own emotional shifts between darkness and resilience, aggression and tenderness, mourning and action.
Starr produced the album alongside longtime collaborators Lin Gardiner and Elisa Pangsaeng, with women also leading the project across composition, production, beat-making, mixing and visual direction.
The wider creative team includes Rob Chursinoff on drums and percussion, Marlow Holder on bass, Clef Seeley on keyboards, guitars and beats, Peter Doig on guitar, and Hluugitgaa Gwaai Edenshaw and Julian Taylor on vocals.
Gardiner, Pangsaeng and Starr handled the mixing, with Pangsaeng also mastering the album.
The visual world of DestroyHer expands beyond the recordings themselves. Video and photography come from Helen Haig-Brown and Hluugitgaa Gwaai Edenshaw, while Edenshaw also created rugged copper jewellery connected to the project. Starr directed and produced the music videos, with Diana Hellson of Vancouver’s Rude Gang Entertainment contributing editing and cameo appearances. Alex Vissia handled the album’s layout, design and editing.
Starr is also opening up the physical world of the record through the All-Starr Archive, reimagining her original 1990s artwork as wearable art.
A limited-edition DestroyHer pre-sale bundle is also available ahead of the expected January 2027 physical release. The package includes a premium vinyl LP, CD digipak, organic oversized T-shirt, embroidered patch, die-cut sticker and bumper magnet.
At its centre, DestroyHer is a record about connection. Starr moves from deeply personal grief towards wider questions of environmental destruction, colonialism, consumption and responsibility, without separating the political from the personal.
“DESTROYER” identifies the machinery of destruction. “Waters: Redux” turns attention towards what remains worth protecting.
Together, they introduce a record built around a simple but expansive idea: that our relationship with the land, water and each other cannot be separated.
We belong to each other, and to the water.
OFFICIAL WEBSITE: www.kinniestarr.ca
EPK: kinniestarr.ca/epk
VEVO: youtube.com/kinniestarrvevo
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/kinniestarr
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/kinniestarr
YOUTUBE: youtube.com/kinniestarr
SPOTIFY: open.spotify.com/artist/209owUSIqCjOCdahzFWdl8
APPLE MUSIC: music.apple.com/ca/artist/kinnie-starr/13331508
