The New Citizen Kane: "Instinct comes first… then structure comes in afterwards as a form of care"

Kane Luke, known as The New Citizen Kane, is an artist who builds universes rather than just albums. After his 2014 debut It’s Not Science... It’s A Feeling and a near-decade hiatus, he returned in 2023 with the acclaimed The Tales of Morpheus, followed by Psychedelika Pt. 1, a 17-track journey through love, philosophy, anxiety, nightlife, and resilience. Expanding into a fully immersive, multisensory project that blends music, photography, video, design, mindfulness, and live performance, Kane pushes far beyond traditional boundaries through his independent label Citizen Records. With roots in Dublin’s theatre scene and studies in music production and photography, he is forging a singular path—transforming emotion and chaos into an expansive, deeply personal artistic world.

After The Tales of Morpheus and the expansion of Psychedelika Pt. 1, where does "LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY", sit within your evolving artistic universe sonically and conceptually?

LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY. is actually the second in an ongoing series of remix-driven side projects. The first was TEMPLE.BEACH.DISCO.DADDY., which arrived in the space between Morpheus and Psychedelika.

With my main albums, the songwriting tends to lead everything — the production serves each song individually, and the wider record usually follows a narrative or emotional arc. The Disco Daddy series works differently. It’s more about exploring songs through a specific genre lens, mood, or physical energy. It’s where producer Kane takes the wheel.

It gives me permission to be more playful, instinctive, and pleasure-led in the studio. Less introspection, more sensation.

Interestingly, both albums began with one song that didn’t belong anywhere else. On TEMPLE.BEACH., that was A Love Fool. On LIQUID.LATEX., it was my cover of There Goes The Neighbourhood. Those outlier tracks ended up becoming portals into whole new worlds.

So within the wider universe, LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY. is the hedonistic cousin — still connected to the emotional core of my work, but arriving through the body rather than the diary.

Your career has been shaped by long creative absences followed by highly conceptual returns. What typically happens in those "silent" periods that fuels your reinventions?

Life, honestly.

One of my tattoos says Everything Is Inspiration, and I genuinely live by that. The silent periods were never empty periods — they were periods of living, learning, failing, changing, loving, grieving, growing. Sometimes stepping away from making art is exactly what gives the next chapter something real to say.

I’ve walked away from music three times, each time thinking it was permanent. But I’ve come to understand that creating is inevitable for me. It’s how I communicate most truthfully. It’s how I process experience, heal from things, and make sense of change.

What’s different now is that I no longer measure creativity by industry timelines or external validation. Earlier in my career, silence felt like disappearance. Now I see it as incubation.

Realising I can build my own ecosystem, on my own terms, outside the traditional machinery of the industry, has been incredibly liberating. It means I return because I have something to express — not because I’m chasing relevance.

With Psychedelika, you’re blending music, visual art, performance, and digital experience into one ecosystem. Does "LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY". push that immersive approach even further, or in a different direction?

It’s fully immersive, but in a different direction.

With Psychedelika, the immersion often comes through emotional depth, narrative, symbolism, and the interplay between sound and image. LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY. is more about mood immersion — the beats, the basslines, the textures, the tone of voice, the physical atmosphere of it all.

It’s designed less as a story and more as an environment.

I wanted it to feel like stepping into a late-night world where instinct takes over — sweaty, primal, playful, liberated. Something sensual and slightly surreal, where movement becomes the language.

At the same time, it still belongs within the wider Psychedelika universe, because to me Psychedelika is a container for the full range of human emotion and experience. It’s the motherboard for everything I’m creating right now.

So LIQUID.LATEX.DISCO.DADDY. is both its own world and one room inside a much larger house.

Your work often balances emotional chaos with meticulous production. How do you navigate the tension between instinct and structure when building a track or a full project?

I think that tension is the work, really. Emotion on its own can be powerful, but without shape it can become vague. Equally, structure without feeling can be impressive but empty. I’m always trying to find the point where those two forces meet.

Usually, instinct comes first. It might be a lyric, a vocal phrase, a feeling in my chest, or even just an atmosphere I can’t quite explain yet. That part is messy and immediate, and I try not to censor it. Then structure comes in afterwards as a form of care — arranging, editing, producing, asking what actually serves the emotion rather than what simply sounds clever.

With a full project, it’s similar but on a larger scale. I’m interested in emotional journeys, how one song changes the meaning of the next. So I’ll let intuition lead the creation, but I’ll use structure to turn it into something coherent and immersive.

For me, discipline isn’t the enemy of feeling — it’s how feeling becomes communicable.

Coming from a background in theatre and multidisciplinary arts, how does that influence the way you construct identity, narrative, and atmosphere in your current work?

Massively. Theatre taught me that meaning doesn’t only live in words — it lives in gesture, silence, lighting, costume, pacing, tension. That stayed with me. Even now, when I’m making a song, I’m often thinking beyond the audio. I’m thinking about what world it belongs to, what it looks like, what emotional temperature it has.

I don’t really separate music from image or narrative. A track isn’t just a track to me — it’s a scene, a character state, sometimes an entire room with its own psychology. That’s probably why I’m drawn to visual albums and cohesive eras rather than isolated singles.

In terms of identity, theatre also made me comfortable with contradiction. We all contain multiple selves depending on context, desire, fear, memory. So I’m not interested in presenting a fixed persona. I’d rather let each project reveal a different angle of the same person.

Atmosphere is incredibly important to me because people often feel something before they understand it. If I can create an atmosphere that feels emotionally true, the narrative tends to find its own way in.

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