KiNG MALA is the stage name of Areli Castro, an alternative-pop and alt-soul singer-songwriter born June 2, 1998, in El Paso, Texas, and now based in Los Angeles. Since her 2021 viral breakout "she calls me daddy," she has built a catalog defined by dark, beat-driven production, Catholic and horror-movie imagery, and a self-coined genre she calls "cunt noir," culminating in her 2025 debut album And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing and its 2026 deluxe reissue.
Areli Castro was born to a Mexican father and a Puerto Rican mother in El Paso, Texas, a border city she has described as "very, very non-Texas" and closer in spirit to a "desert witch" identity than the rest of the state, per the Los Angeles Times. She was raised attending Catholic church, and her hispanic upbringing remains central to how she talks about her work: she has said she is "passionate about supporting the LGBTQ+, POC and Indigenous communities and being open about mental health," per Positive Publicity.
Her musical education was unusually formal for an artist who would go on to build a career on TikTok virality. She sang opera for roughly eight years and studied choir, harmony and theory through conservatory-style programs from middle school through high school. Her earliest listening came from records her father played at home, Biggie, Tupac, Insane Clown Posse and classical music on one side, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Etta James and Aretha Franklin discovered largely through YouTube lyric videos on the other, per Alternative Press and LADYGUNN. She has also cited Adele and Amy Winehouse as vocal influences. At 14, her mother bought her a secondhand upright piano off Craigslist, a purchase Castro calls the pivotal moment that pushed her toward serious songwriting. She began performing at wine bars and coffee shops around El Paso using a fake ID.
At 18, immediately after high school, Castro left El Paso for Los Angeles, enrolling briefly at a music school before shifting to contemporary music study. She has described herself at the time as "freshly 18, just out of high school... terrified of the world," and said leaving her hometown "kick-started everything." She later graduated from the Independent Artist program at Musicians Institute in Hollywood.
The name KiNG MALA is a deliberate collision of gender and cultural identity. "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, which is a little nod to my Hispanic roots," she told American Songwriter. Elsewhere she has put it more bluntly: "King cuz f*** being someone's queen, and mala literally means 'bad bitch' in Spanish." She treats the name as an alter ego distinct from her offstage self: "KiNG MALA is someone I step into to make this art, and then Areli is like who I am day to day. I have my sister, dog, and parents; that's me. And KiNG MALA, she's her own bitch!" she told OUT FRONT Magazine.
Castro's professional output as KiNG MALA began in 2019 with early singles "Shadows," "Hurricane" and "Sugarblind," which established the velvety-verse, raspy-hook vocal signature that would define her sound. She built her live chops the analog way, playing local shows with a backing band around Los Angeles, before meeting producer Rob Auerbach, with whom she began writing her debut EP, GEMiNi, in early 2020. When COVID-19 lockdowns hit, the pair used the shutdown to keep writing rather than pause, delivering the six-track GEMiNi later that year, produced by Auerbach and mastered by John Greenham, whose credits include Billie Eilish, Sam Smith, Katy Perry and Banks. During the pandemic she also appeared on livestreams, including In Flight Music Group's "Corona Fest" and a two-week residency at Mad Muse Studios in downtown LA.
KiNG MALA's true breakout arrived with April 2021's "she calls me daddy," a groovy, alt-soul single that went viral on TikTok and has since accumulated more than 36 million streams on Spotify, per Cryptic Rock. She followed it that July with "mercy," her first release through Handwritten Records, which racked up over 1.3 million plays within its first few months, and closed the year with "golden retriever boy" in October. This run of singles built the TikTok-driven fanbase that would carry her into her first EP cycle with Handwritten.
It was in this exact window, 2021 into early 2022, as KiNG MALA's momentum was accelerating on the back of "she calls me daddy" and ahead of her 2022 EP honey catching season, that she was part of the broader creative circle around Live 2 Create, a Los Angeles TikTok-and-livestream artist collective founded around 2018 to 2020 by then-USC student McClain Portis. Portis built the organization around an "art not algorithms" Spotify playlist that grew past 120,000 followers and a cohort-style artist-development arm called the ANA Freshman Class, giving emerging musicians promotional support and content teams without requiring a major-label deal. A signature piece of Live2's grassroots strategy was its backyard concert series, DIY shows staged in a Los Angeles backyard and filmed as episodic content for YouTube and TikTok, with documented installments running from September 2021 through a larger AG Club show in March 2022.
KiNG MALA and Christian Gates, then performing under the handle itsluxcity, were both booked on the same Live 2 Create backyard-concert bill in this period, a show the collective heavily promoted. Gates ultimately withdrew because of a scheduling conflict tied to his contractual commitment to his own first headline show at The Roxy in West Hollywood on February 26, 2022. Gates's affiliation with Live2's ANA Freshman Class is independently documented in a collective-produced episode profiling his rise; KiNG MALA sat alongside other artists such as Devon Again in that same informal, tastemaker-style Hollywood creator-house network, a loosely structured scene that by nature left a thinner press footprint than a formal roster.
KiNG MALA's catalog runs from independent 2019 singles through a formal, ongoing partnership with Handwritten Records, distributed via Virgin Music, that has anchored her output since 2021.
| Release | Type | Date | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shadows / Hurricane / Sugarblind | Singles | 2019 | Independent |
| GEMiNi | EP | 2020 | Independent |
| she calls me daddy | Single | April 2021 | Handwritten Records |
| mercy | Single | July 2021 | Handwritten Records |
| golden retriever boy | Single | October 2021 | Handwritten Records |
| honey catching season | EP | Late 2022 | Handwritten Records |
| bug | EP | October 20, 2023 | Handwritten Records |
| SPILT MILK | EP | November 2023 | Handwritten Records |
| hypothetical / ANIMAL | Singles | 2024 | Handwritten Records |
| And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing | Album | May 2, 2025 | Handwritten Records |
| EAT THE SPOON | Single | October 2025 | Handwritten Records |
| Toxic (feat. Audrey Nuna) | Single | January 2026 | Handwritten Records |
| SURRENDER | Single | February 20, 2026 | Handwritten Records |
| And You Who Drowned... (The Director's Cut) | Deluxe Album | July 2, 2026 | Handwritten Records |
The debut EP GEMiNi included "Funeral" and "Sugarblind." honey catching season's nine tracks included "martyr," "cult leader" (her second major viral moment) and "sloppy" featuring UPSAHL. SPILT MILK included "sunny side up" and "i only smoke to feel bad." Her debut album, a 12-track horror-and-religion concept record, was preceded by singles "GØD" in January 2025 and "FUN!" in March 2025, and its 2026 Director's Cut expanded the tracklist to 17 songs, adding "EAT THE SPOON," "THE PARTY" and "I STILL KNOW YOU," with writing credits including Josie Dunne, Deza, Libby Larkin, Elie Rizk and longtime producer Rob Auerbach.
Press consistently frames KiNG MALA as dark, beat-driven alt-pop with alt-soul and hyperpop-adjacent textures. Apple Music's editorial copy places her alongside "dark alt-pop contemporaries like Billie Eilish and Banks," while AllMusic calls her "the brooding, beat-driven alt pop alter ego of Los Angeles artist Areli Castro." Castro has coined her own label for the sound: "I think 'cunt noir' and 'horror pop,' I would call it," she told OUT FRONT Magazine in 2025. She has also embraced "goth pop" as a descriptor, telling Breach Magazine, "I definitely appreciate the [goth] genre as a whole, although it's not really what I would call myself... I do love being compared." The Los Angeles Times dubbed her a "goth pop star" who "channels her inner 'desert witch'" on her debut album.
Her debut album's entire concept, a horror-movie "possession story" in which an entity offers the main character power in exchange for her body and humanity, drew directly on The Exorcist, The Blair Witch Project, Midsommar, The Witch, The Substance and the films of Robert Eggers. She cites Catholic and Egyptian death lore, Renaissance and Brutalist art, and religious metaphor broadly as recurring vocabulary: "I love religious metaphor. I find it so grand and ancient and fun to use as a vehicle to tell a story." Production-wise, she and her team pursued "analog drums and hip-hop beats with reverbed-out, textural guitar, à la Mk.gee... we wanted it to feel alive and analog," she told the LA Times. She frequently plays with masculine and feminine tension in image and sound: "There's something about taking something traditionally masculine and wearing it as a woman that makes me feel really powerful."
KiNG MALA's live career scaled from El Paso wine bars and Los Angeles club dates to sold-out headline runs across North America, the UK and Europe. She played a full show at the Constellation Room in Santa Ana in September 2022 and a hometown-adjacent Austin show that November, with family flying in from El Paso to attend. With the release of SPILT MILK in late 2023, she embarked on her first-ever sold-out U.S. headline tour, beginning November 28 in Brooklyn, a run that later extended into the UK and Europe.
Following the May 2025 release of her debut album, KiNG MALA joined Canadian electro-pop artist Lights as direct support on the North American "(A)LIVE AGAIN Tour," a 19-date run beginning May 8 in Victoria, BC and closing June 7 in Toronto, with stops including a Roxy Theatre date in Los Angeles on May 20. Immediately after, she returned home for her own headline show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood on June 26, 2025, billed as "The Return of the King, A Homecoming Event." That fall she launched her own 12-city headline trek, The Devotion Tour, supported by DEZI, running November 28 in Portland through December 14 in Washington, DC, with stops in Seattle, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto, Montreal, Philadelphia, Somerville and New York. Touring continued into 2026 with European dates, including a stop in Haarlem, Netherlands, and a deep 20-song setlist that closes with "she calls me daddy" as an encore staple.
KiNG MALA's collaborator list stays close to the alt-pop and hyperpop-adjacent scene she emerged from. UPSAHL features on "sloppy" from honey catching season; Kailee Morgue features on "Falling From The Sky," flagged by industry tracker Viberate as one of her two most notable collaborations. bennytheghost features on 2024's "ANIMAL." In January 2026, Audrey Nuna joined her for a moody cover of Britney Spears's "Toxic," released to accompany a Valorant season cinematic titled "Why We Fight Back." Josie Dunne, Deza, Libby Larkin and Elie Rizk are credited as writers on the 2026 Director's Cut of her debut album, alongside Rob Auerbach, her most consistent collaborator, who has produced her catalog since GEMiNi in 2020.
Her professional infrastructure, per a 2025 industry post, runs through management trio Michael Kaminsky, Matt Clarke and Peter Hill of KMGMT, a credit echoed across her music-video credits back to 2022; her label is Handwritten Records, distributed via Virgin Music; her Australia and New Zealand booking runs through Harry Moore and Jariah Travan of Lonely Lands Agency, with the same 2025 post noting she was seeking worldwide representation outside that territory. Publishing has been credited at different points to Angry Mob Music Group (a 2021 worldwide administration deal) and PULSE Music Group/Double Down 11 (2025), with it unclear whether one arrangement lapsed into the other. Music videos frequently credit production company Echobend Pictures and director-production designer Conner Landers Sorensen.
As of mid-2025, third-party tracker Music Metrics Vault recorded KiNG MALA at roughly 501,000 monthly Spotify listeners, a snapshot figure that fluctuates and should be treated as directional. Her signature single "she calls me daddy" has accumulated more than 36 million Spotify streams, while 2021's "mercy" passed 1.3 million streams within its first few months. On TikTok, the platform that built her audience, she has amassed more than 550,000 followers. Her two definitive viral moments, "she calls me daddy" (2021) and "cult leader" (2022), are repeatedly cited across press coverage as the catalysts for her subsequent EP cycles.
| Metric | Figure | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Spotify monthly listeners | ~501,000 | Mid-2025 |
| "she calls me daddy" streams | 36M+ | 2025 |
| "mercy" streams (first months) | 1.3M+ | 2021 |
| TikTok followers | 550,000+ | 2025 |
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1998 | Areli Castro born June 2 in El Paso, Texas. |
| 2019 | Debut singles "Shadows," "Hurricane" and "Sugarblind" released independently. |
| 2020 | Debut EP GEMiNi released, written and recorded with Rob Auerbach during COVID-19 lockdowns. |
| 2021 | "she calls me daddy" goes viral; signs with Handwritten Records; releases "mercy" and "golden retriever boy." |
| 2022 | Booked on a Live 2 Create backyard-show bill alongside Christian Gates, who withdrew to headline his own debut concert at The Roxy on February 26, 2022; releases sophomore EP honey catching season. |
| 2023 | Releases EPs bug and SPILT MILK; embarks on first sold-out U.S. headline tour, later extending to the UK and Europe. |
| 2024 | Releases singles "hypothetical" and "ANIMAL" featuring bennytheghost. |
| 2025 | Releases debut album And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing; supports Lights on the (A)LIVE AGAIN Tour; headlines the Troubadour; launches The Devotion Tour. |
| 2026 | Releases "Toxic" with Audrey Nuna and "SURRENDER"; releases And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing (The Director's Cut) on July 2. |
KiNG MALA is a solo project, the stage persona of singer-songwriter Areli Castro. She has described the name as an alter ego distinct from her offstage self, saying "KiNG MALA is someone I step into to make this art, and then Areli is like who I am day to day."
It is a genre label Castro coined herself to describe her sound and aesthetic, used alongside "horror pop" in a 2025 interview with OUT FRONT Magazine: "I think 'cunt noir' and 'horror pop,' I would call it."
Yes. In the 2021 to early-2022 window, both artists were part of the same Live 2 Create backyard-concert scene and were booked on the same bill. Christian Gates withdrew from that show due to a scheduling conflict with his own first headline concert at The Roxy on February 26, 2022.
"she calls me daddy," released in April 2021, remains her signature track and has passed 36 million Spotify streams. "cult leader," from the 2022 EP honey catching season, is her second major viral hit.
And You Who Drowned in the Grief of a Golden Thing, released May 2, 2025, is a 12-track concept album built around a horror-movie "possession story," drawing on films including The Exorcist, Midsommar and The Witch. A 17-track Director's Cut followed in July 2026.
KiNG MALA's early trajectory sits alongside other Los Angeles TikTok-first artists who built careers outside the traditional label pipeline, including Devon Again, part of the same Live 2 Create circle assembled by McClain Portis. Readers interested in the broader dark-pop and goth-pop scene she is frequently placed within may also consult entries on Isabel LaRosa and Artemas, both cited alongside her in press comparisons of the genre's current wave.