KIER Steps Into Pop With New Single 'Twenty Something'
"My new stuff genre-wise is a bit of a reach from my last releases," KIER says, "it's not really classed as country anymore, more Singer/Songwriter/Pop." It is a modest way to describe a change of address. The Yorkshire singer-songwriter spent the last few years building a name in the UK country and Americana scene, playing Tramlines Festival and C2C London along the way, and her debut album, 'Welcome To The Strange Life', charted in the top three on iTunes. 'Twenty Something', which came out on 25 September 2026 and is out now, is where she steps across a line.
She does not frame it as a break, though, and the single bears her out. She calls it a natural evolution rather than a complete departure. The singer-songwriter and alternative pop influences, as she tells it, have always sat underneath her music, and this is simply the moment they come up to the surface.
The credits tell the same story. The players come from the live room. Wayne Proctor is on drums, Ash Wilson plays all the guitars, Steve Amadeo is on bass, and Matt Daly's piano was tracked at Rawson Street Studios. Then Jack Trouble arrives with every synth, the percussion and the electronic drum programming. Proctor and Trouble produced it together, and the single sits where those two approaches meet: hands on instruments in a room, and pop built on a screen. Oli Brown's backing vocal arrangement does the stitching between them. Proctor then mixed and mastered it at the House Of Tone Mix Suite, where the guitars, bass and all the vocals were tracked. The result is intimate singer-songwriter pop with a polished sheen.
The subject is your twenties not going to plan, and how she tells it is the part that comes straight from the country years. The lyric talks to you, conversational and wry, with humour folded through it, the way a storyteller from that tradition sits you down and walks you through what happened. She says the song came from wanting to write about that honestly, and it arrives in the speaking voice of someone who has spent years telling stories in songs.
The company she keeps for herself makes sense of the move. Maisie Peters is the obvious neighbour for the wry, diaristic side of it. Lizzy McAlpine and Holly Humberstone point at the quieter, more exposed end of the spectrum, the kind of pop where a single line about your own life lands like a confession. Gracie Abrams belongs to that lineage too, at a larger scale. HAIM bring something else entirely: musicians who play together, whose pop has always had the bones of a band inside it. KIER also names Jade Bird, Matilda Mann, Dylan and Suki Waterhouse, with Olivia Dean and Sabrina Carpenter further up the ladder. None of them quite describes her. What links the list is a belief that a pop song can be clever and warm in the same breath, and that a good story deserves a good chorus.
'Twenty Something' is the second single from her second studio album, and another glimpse of where she is heading.
