King Woman

Sacramento, the church, and the long way round

Kristina Esfandiari was born in Sacramento on 4 March 1988, to an Iranian father and a Serbian mother, and grew up inside a charismatic Christian church. That upbringing — speaking in tongues, deliverance, the constant presence of the supernatural as an ordinary household fact — is the raw material nearly everything she has written since draws on. She moved to the San Francisco Bay Area at 22.

King Woman began in 2009 as something closer to a bedroom project than a band, and for years it stayed that way. Her first wider exposure came sideways: she sang for the shoegaze group Whirr in 2012 and 2013, appearing on the Around EP. King Woman only became a working group in 2014, built around the childhood friend she had known longest, drummer Joey Raygoza. The Doubt EP followed in 2015, slow and enormous, with the vocal buried deep in the mix rather than perched on top of it.

The line-up has changed around the two of them. Colin Gallagher played guitar from 2014 to 2021; Peter Arensdorf joined on bass in 2016 and took on guitar duties as well from 2019, which is the configuration the band tours in now — Esfandiari on vocals and rhythm guitar, Arensdorf covering lead guitar and bass parts, Raygoza behind the kit.

Two records on Relapse

Created in the Image of Suffering arrived in 2017 on Relapse Records and did what the EP had promised: doom tempos, shoegaze textures, and a voice that refused to shout over any of it. Pitchfork counted it among the best rock albums of that year. The same period brought the band a different kind of attention when it withdrew from a Pentagram tour in 2016 over that group's frontman's conduct, a decision that was reported well beyond the metal press.

Celestial Blues, the record the current tour is built on, was cut in December 2019 at The Atomic Garden in Oakland, with Jack Shirley engineering, mixing and mastering and Esfandiari handling production and sound design. Release was held until 30 July 2021. Three singles set it up: 'Morning Star' on 2 June 2021, 'Psychic Wound' on 30 June, and 'Boghz' on 14 July. The album reworks Paradise Lost and the fall of Lucifer into something autobiographical, sympathetic to the rebel rather than the authority — a reading of scripture that could only have come from someone raised close enough to it to argue.

It landed well. Metacritic settled at 83 out of 100 from the critical spread; Kerrang! gave it four out of five, Pitchfork 7.5, Sputnikmusic 4.5, and Beats Per Minute 83 per cent. Commercially it entered at number 13 on Billboard's Current Rock Albums chart, number 4 on Hard Music Albums, number 9 on Independent Current Albums and number 43 on Vinyl Albums — modest numbers in absolute terms, respectable ones for a doom record on an independent metal label.

The other names on the sleeve

Esfandiari has never worked under one banner at a time. Miserable, started in 2014, is the shoegaze outlet, with Uncontrollable released in 2016. Dalmatian, from 2019, is her rap project. NGHTCRWLR, from 2020, is the harshest of the lot — noise and industrial drone. Sugar High, also from 2020, is a collaboration with producer Darcy Baylis that yielded Love Addict the same year. Fans tend to treat these as one continuous body of work rather than a main act with hobbies, and the sheer spread of them explains why King Woman's own release schedule has never been annual.

The project's most recent studio recording is 'Bury', issued in 2024 as the closing-credits song for Jane Schoenbrun's film I Saw the TV Glow, released by A24. Esfandiari also appears on screen in the film performing 'Psychic Wound'. She described the collaboration as 'one of those magical occurrences where it felt like something I was just meant to be a part of'. The placement did what a good soundtrack slot does — it sent a large audience with no prior interest in doom metal backwards into a catalogue that had been sitting there since 2015.

Where things stand, September 2026

No third King Woman album has been announced. What has happened instead is that the band built a touring year around the record it already has. Celestial Blues turned five on 30 July 2026, and the anniversary run started in advance of that date: Le Poisson Rouge in New York on 10 July, The Empty Bottle in Chicago on 11 July, the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco on 15 July, and the Lodge Room in Highland Park, Los Angeles, on 18 July. The New York show sold out. Advance tickets there were 30 dollars, 35 on the door, all ages.

The band is now billed out of New York and Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area, with the booking agency describing Esfandiari as an NYC- and LA-based songwriter, producer and vocalist. Raygoza remains the constant.

The autumn schedule is the busiest stretch the project has had in years. Saint Vitus Bar in Brooklyn on 22 September, alongside Blu Anxxiety, Maiya Blainey and Reagan Holiday, is followed by Cold Waves XIV at the Metro in Chicago on 27 September. Europe then runs almost without a gap: Luxor in Cologne on 1 October, Betty in Hamburg on the 2nd, the Columbia Theater in Berlin on the 4th, Hydrozagadka in Warsaw on the 5th, Subzero in Prague on the 7th, Feierwerk in Munich on the 8th, Das Bett in Frankfurt on the 12th, KIFF in Aarau on the 13th, Petit Bain in Paris on the 15th, Oslo in Hackney on the 16th, and G2 in Glasgow on the 18th. The agency also lists Rain City Doom Fest in Seattle on 18 December.

The set as it stands

The summer shows were staged in the round — the band in the middle of the floor, the audience on all sides — which for a group whose sound depends on volume and a slow build is a deliberately awkward choice, and the point. There is nowhere to hide a monitor wedge or a lighting rig, and no back of the stage to retreat to.

The setlist has been consistent. In San Francisco on 15 July the band opened with the title track and worked through 'Ruse', 'Entwined', 'Golgotha', 'Boghz', 'Coil', 'Psychic Wound', 'Paradise Lost' and 'Morning Star' — effectively the album, resequenced — before 'Bury' and a cover of The Stone Roses' 'I Wanna Be Adored' to finish. That cover has been the closer at every documented 2026 show, and the average set across the year runs to roughly a dozen songs.

Support has been chosen locally and eclectically rather than genre-matched: Superfan and a solo turn from Reagan Holiday in New York; Whine, Fentanyl and Roselia Valentine on the San Francisco bill; Cockstar opening in London. The London date at Oslo is 16-plus, £25 in advance, doors at seven with a ten o'clock curfew — which sets the realistic running time for the headline set at somewhere around an hour.