Areli Castro spent roughly eight years singing opera before she ever wrote a song about being possessed by a demon in exchange for power. That contradiction, conservatory discipline colliding with horror-movie theater, is the entire premise of KiNG MALA, and it explains why she eventually stopped waiting for critics to find the right words for her music and coined her own.
"I think 'cunt noir' and 'horror pop,' I would call it," she told OUT FRONT Magazine in 2025, naming a genre that doesn't exist anywhere else on a chart or a playlist tag. It is a fitting move for an artist whose stage name was itself an invented collision from the start.
A Name Built to Contradict Itself
Born June 2, 1998, in El Paso, Texas, to a Mexican father and Puerto Rican mother, Castro grew up in what she has called a "very, very non-Texas" border city, closer in spirit to a desert witch than the rest of the state, per the Los Angeles Times. She sang in choir and studied harmony and theory through conservatory-style programs from middle school on, while her father's records, Biggie and Tupac on one side, Etta James and Aretha Franklin on the other, ran alongside classical music at home.
At 14, a secondhand Craigslist piano became the pivot point. At 18, she left for Los Angeles, eventually graduating from the Independent Artist program at Musicians Institute in Hollywood. The stage name came later, deliberately built from opposition. "I decided to go with 'king' because I consider myself pretty androgynous and I love the idea of balancing that masculine and feminine energy artistically, and 'mala' means 'bad bitch' in Spanish," she told American Songwriter. She has drawn a hard line between the two identities ever since: "KiNG MALA is someone I step into to make this art, and then Areli is like who I am day to day."
The Backyard Circuit That Built Her Audience
The breakout arrived fast once it arrived. April 2021's KiNG MALA single "she calls me daddy" went viral on TikTok and has since passed 36 million Spotify streams. She signed with Handwritten Records that same year, releasing "mercy" in July and "golden retriever boy" in October, the run that carried her into her first EP cycle.
That momentum put her inside the same Los Angeles orbit as Live 2 Create, a TikTok-and-livestream artist collective built around McClain Portis's backyard-concert series. In the 2021-to-early-2022 window, KiNG MALA was booked on a Live2 bill alongside Christian Gates, then performing as itsluxcity. Gates ultimately withdrew, tied up in the run-up to his own first headline show at The Roxy on February 26, 2022, but the shared bill is a small, documented marker of just how compressed and interconnected that Hollywood creator-house scene was before either artist had a proper agency deal.
She spent eight years learning opera so she could later write songs about demonic possession.
Cunt Noir, or How to Name Your Own Genre
By the time honey catching season landed in late 2022, followed by bug and SPILT MILK in 2023, the sound had hardened into something press struggled to file neatly. AllMusic called her "the brooding, beat-driven alt pop alter ego of Los Angeles artist Areli Castro," while Apple Music's editorial copy placed her beside "dark alt-pop contemporaries like Billie Eilish and Banks." Castro's own term cuts closer: cunt noir, horror pop, occasionally goth pop, a descriptor she has said she appreciates without fully claiming.
That vocabulary found its fullest expression on May 2025's debut album, And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing, a 12-track concept record built around a possession story pulling directly from The Exorcist, Midsommar, The Witch and the films of Robert Eggers. "I love religious metaphor. I find it so grand and ancient and fun to use as a vehicle to tell a story," she has said, leaning on Catholic imagery from a childhood spent in church pews. Production followed the same logic: analog drums, hip-hop-inflected beats, reverbed guitar in the vein of Mk.gee. "We wanted it to feel alive and analog," she told the LA Times.
Channels her inner 'desert witch' on her debut album.Los Angeles Times
The Director's Cut and What Comes Next
The album cycle kept expanding rather than closing. "EAT THE SPOON" arrived in October 2025, a duet with Audrey Nuna covering Britney Spears's "Toxic" followed in January 2026 for a Valorant cinematic, and "SURRENDER" landed that February. On July 2, 2026, the album returned as The Director's Cut, expanded to 17 tracks with new writing credits from Josie Dunne, Deza, Libby Larkin and Elie Rizk alongside longtime producer Rob Auerbach, who has shaped her sound since 2020's GEMiNi.
Live, the album's horror logic plays out across a 20-song set that still closes on "she calls me daddy" as an encore staple, from The Devotion Tour's 12 cities in late 2025 to European dates into 2026. For an artist who spent her teenage years singing opera in a border city she describes as more witch than Texan, the arc makes a strange kind of sense: KiNG MALA didn't need a genre to already exist. She built one, named it herself, and kept touring until the rest of the industry caught up to the vocabulary.