the key vs. locket / twikipedia interview

“The more you think about genre, the more you're going to restrict yourself to try and stay in that genre’s box. And that might make you not take as many chances as you would have taken.”

an interview by mikenslee

New York City is busy and overstimulating, sounds emanating from every direction almost anywhere you go. There’s more people walking in and along the streets than there are cars, but somehow, the few vehicles manage to make more noise than all of the people combined. Surrounded by aromatic restaurants in the middle of Chinatown is the somewhat quieter Columbus Park, a short walk from the subway station I’d come from on a humid day in the latter half of August. This was where 22 year old Laura Almeida had chosen for us to meet, anticipating cool, decently tempered weather for us to sit and talk about her artistry. 

With me, I’d brought a tiny notebook with my questions spaced out through several of the miniature pages, but a fat drop of rain scared it away only a few moments after I’d sat to wait on one of the concrete bench tables. The ink bled fractionally as I waited for Laura, my eyes idly darting between the gradual drooping of the wet letters, the heavy clouds formulating in the sky, and a group of teenagers tossing a ball back and forth directly over the table I’d chosen. I considered relocating until I saw her walking towards the big statue a few feet away from me, simultaneously sending a message to have me lift my head and intentionally seek her out. It was easy to spot her in contrast to the others in the park, slender and grungy, her hair carefully styled to frame her face. I avoided the rugby-ball passing back and forth as I approached her, and together we decided on the very same bench for the time being. 

Laura didn’t always live here, oscillating between her hometown of Niterói, Brazil with her mom and New Jersey with her dad. “I claim like, full Brazil,” she was quick to clarify. “I grew up there, it was my first language and everything. I don't know what I would be doing, claiming New Jersey,” she had quipped, beginning to tell me what it was like growing up there. “People really, really care about how you present in Brazil. If you look different or whatever, they’ll say something to you. It helps that I’m in New York City now, no one really cares over here. I could wear whatever I want, do whatever I want. Over there people might get on your ass. They might just point at you on the street or record you on their phone or something,” she explained. “Last time I went to Brazil, they were doing hand crosses at me on the street,” she laughed, lifting her hands when I seemed dumbfounded. “Swear to god. And, I mean, I have the brain power to handle that kind of thing nowadays, but as a little kid, it definitely made me want to express myself a bit less, you know? But still, I really love it there. I'm trying to go back again next year, stay for like, three months. Maybe I’m gonna end up living there again one day, but I’m trying to stay here for now. All of my music friends are here.”

As a kid, Laura– key vs. locket or Delta as we know her– found herself floating somewhat aimlessly between her creative hobbies and phases. An animator, a YouTuber, an editor, an artist– there was no solid foundation guiding her goals when she developed an early interest in making song mashups over a decade ago. “I was just trying to do random shit when I was a kid,” she told me with a brief shrug, “I guess music was the one thing that I kept doing.” 

It became habitual for her, experimenting with a variety of software until she eventually started making lo-fi beats. It gradually grew into a serious hobby, and after realizing her friends at the time didn’t share her interest, she started drifting towards making “stupider music” in the form of meme-rap to appeal to them. “I wasn't friends with any music people for the first, like, 5 years of me making it,” she went on to explain. “So it was kind of like an echo chamber.” It wasn’t until her discovery of saturn’s song omegle reuploaded on a fan’s SoundCloud in December 2019 that an entirely new world would open up for her. “I already knew 100 gecs at the time, but I didn't really know that there were independent people making music that was kind of like that. That was my first moment of being, like, oh, I could try doing this, you know?”

Through the following years, Laura spent a great deal of time experimenting with her personal sound. She was influenced a lot by the friends she made after joining Osquinn’s discord server in 2020, surrounded by a plethora of young up-and-coming artists who shared her passion. They’d make music together simultaneously in discord calls, streaming their processes with one another and creating a much louder, more productive echo chamber that filled the empty space and allowed her to grow into her own style. A vast expanse of music started building up beneath her old moniker, twikipedia, a project that carried the majority of her earlier discography from 2019-2024. 

In the latter half of 2023, she started teaching herself how to play the guitar. The computer had been her primary instrument for her entire career, but as she started gravitating towards a more guitar focused sound, the artificial ones in FL studio didn’t do enough for her. Learning how to play became important. “I started trying to learn really complicated music at first. The first song I tried learning on guitar was Gnaw by Alex G. And that song is really, really, really hard,” she emphasized. “When I was making the for the rest of your life album, I was trying to learn guitar at the same time. But I was so bad that I was, like, let me just finish this with the fake one, and then drop something with real guitar. And that was the still-life thing,” she recalled. “Around the time I wanted to make my i felt like a sketch album, that's when I was like, okay, let me grind. And, I mean, I got better, but that album has so many basic chords,” they laughed. “Not to say that makes it bad, but it was a lot of the campfire guitar chords that are usually people's first chords. That's what I was using on that album, but, I don't know, I think I made it work.”

Guitar gradually became a passion of hers, having had fleeting interest towards it at multiple points in her life, learning to play was something she said she wished she committed to sooner. 

“You know, probably everything about music got easier with time.” Laura muses, following a brief lull to collect her thoughts. “Making the songs got easier with time. Playing guitar got easier with time. Taking a long time to make a project got easier with time. Because, you know, the first project I did that with was chronic, and people liked it. That gave me the confirmation of being, like, okay, I could do this.”

A few months after the release of her fourth twikipedia album, for the rest of your life, Laura began her current key vs. locket project in late 2024 with the three song EP my demos. “I was sitting on the New Jersey transit bus, and I had a fossil bag that I got for, like, $40 on Depop. It had a key and a locket, and I was like, oh, that's kind of cool,” she elucidated. “At first, it was just a page I’d put demos on, so I wasn’t thinking too hard about it. But I was like, you know what? I like this name more than twikipedia. If I did rock music under this name, it would be catchier than doing it as twikipedia.”

In reference to the old name, she joked, “When I was doing music as twikipedia, everyone’s initial reaction was, like, “the fuck? Twikipedia? Like Twinkipedia?” 

Laura goes on to tell me more about her experiences with her fans, and the people that interact with her online. “I like to interact with people as much as I can. But I honestly take things really personally, so I try to keep it minimal, for my own sanity you know?” she laughed, somewhat sheepish. “But I mean, for what interactions I’ve had, people are really nice. They stick around, and I really appreciate that they’ve stuck around for this long, considering I’m not really up or anything. I didn’t really take any of the chances that were given to me, you know?” She’d shrugged. “A lot of labels did hit me up, but I ended up not doing anything. I was just like, oh, I don’t know if this is gonna be good for me or not. The good part of the fan interactions and stuff is that I think I have pretty dedicated fans. I can take a year working on something, and people are gonna tune around and listen when I'm gonna drop shit. I don't like making people wait, obviously, but if I do take a long time, there's gonna be a little buzz when I drop something, you know? I like that. I really appreciate how committed people are. I’ve gotten a lot of drawings and stuff, and it’s really cute. I appreciate all that kind of thing.”

After a second, she had cut herself off. “My bad if I’m talking too much,” correcting herself after a short moment. “I guess that’s the point.”

When she made the decision to launch her new project, something completely detached from what she had been maintaining with twikipedia for five years prior, she knew that’d come with a new wave of people interested in her work as key vs. locket without having been aware of her before. “I don't really have a very digestible sound, I think. So the people that already like me, they're just going to keep listening, you know? It's kind of hard to get new people to like it. But I was really glad that a lot of people first heard of me as key vs. locket. I feel like that makes me want to try a lot of different things under the alias, because people are actually giving this a chance. And I don't need to stick to what people know me for, what people think is good,” she smiled, “I could just try out a bunch of new shit.” 

“I wanted to make a twee-pop album after the screamo album I'm making right now,” she hums, “I feel like by the time I'm 25, I want to have three or four more albums released on streaming. I want to do another rap album, but for the Delta page this time instead of the old twikipedia page. I'll probably do another screamo EP, but not an album, 'cause, honestly, making this album has been really tiring. I'm trying to make it stick to one thing, screamo or whatever, but it's a little hard when you're learning how to do it from scratch. But I don’t know, I kind of just choose stuff on a whim. I decided to do this current album because I was listening to a lot of music like that. I was like oh, let me try to do that.” 

I asked her what she felt of genre as a concept, given she had explored several in her career. “I know people like genres because, I mean, it's easy in conversation, to be like, ‘I like this, this, and this.’ It makes it objective. It gives people a mental image of artists they like, so I get why people hold genres really close and really like discussing them. But I don't know, I feel like the best music is made by people who don't really think about genre in that way. Because the more you think about it, the more you're going to restrict yourself to try and stay in that genre’s box. And that might make you not take as many chances as you would have taken.”

With this mindset, Laura committed herself to exploring her current project without hindrance from the people telling her to return to her older sound. 

“When I started fully doing the rock stuff, there was a lot of talk about myself and my peers, and that was, ‘oh, y'all think you're better in the music you were doing,’ or like, ‘you think you're taking yourself more seriously by making this kind of music?’ But honestly, I've always just wanted to make stuff like the music I'm currently listening to. So in 2024, I started listening to other stuff, and I was just like, I just wanna make music like what I'm listening to right now, you know? And it was a really, really painful process to sit down and have to teach myself everything from scratch again. But I feel like if you make music, you should always try to do a lot of stuff in a lot of different genres,” she expressed. “I feel like it's not as big of a deal as people make it, I just really like music. The first music genre I ever made was chiptune. And then I made lo-fi, and then I made trap… I already switched genres so many times before people even knew who I was, you know?”

She continued, “I also thought people were gonna shit on me, or say that I was ‘pulling a Jane’ or whatever, because she was already doing the weird music to rock shift.” Jane Remover, Laura’s friend and fellow genre-bending artist, notoriously shifted her sound with the release of her 2023 album Census Designated. “So I thought people would be like, ‘you're like Jane 2.’ That was honestly a hard thing to get over, because I knew that the music I was making had nothing to do with Jane. I don't think it ever did, unless we're talking, like, 2020 to 2022. That's when I was kind of inspired by her sound, everybody was. But I looked towards different places with my rock music to get inspiration from what she was looking at. I was listening to Parannoul and stuff.” 

Within that vein, she goes on to explain her process of sampling and interpolation to me. “I try to be as least referential as I can be in my music, even though I sample a lot. I don't really want people to think of anyone else when they listen to it,” she expressed. “In the past, I used to sing vocal melodies from my friend's music a lot in, like, 2020. I used to straight up take lines from them or straight up just sing the same things they sung in a song, just because that was the music I was really obsessed with, so it kind of transpired into the stuff I was making. I'm still like that to a degree, but it's not as direct, because I feel like you don't get to be as direct like that when you're, like, 22 years old,” she joked, laughing. “People are gonna be, like, they be grown as fuck, just copying everybody.”  She’d trailed off with a shake of her head, still smiling.

“But I still do reference a lot of things in my music that the people who listen to the stuff that I'm inspired by will probably recognize, you know? I feel like the comparisons people are going to make on my new album are going to make me happy. I think that people are going to have comparisons that are gonna be like, yeah, that's what I was going for. Because with my last thing, people were kind of just shooting darts everywhere. They were like, ‘oh, this is an Origami Angel rip off.’ I’d never even heard of Origami Angel before then,” she laughed. “I don't know. I'm getting too deep. People are gonna know I read all the reviews.”

We’d reached a point in the day in which the wind started to pick up, a few more thick droplets of rain building up, dripping from the tree above our heads, and landing flat on her. “What the fuck was that?” she remarked, sympathizing with my sentiment to be grateful it wasn’t from a bird. “Yeah, I’m not trying to get shat on during my interview.” 

The conversation remains rooted in her sampling process, but we’re unable to restrain ourselves from straying into nerdier territory as a result. Laura had built up a vast catalogue of samples over the years, but of course I had to ask her about my personal favorite, her usage of Ace Attorney’s Maya Fey ~ Turnabout Sisters 2001 in her track vests on the D2LTA account. “I really like Godot, the guy with the white hair. I like every case he shows up in,” she recollects. “For some reason, the only case I can remember right now off the top of my head is the one with the really buff guy, the samurai case. What case was that?” I was too quick to answer The Steel Samurai, episode 3 of the first game, and she seemed to remember everything at once. “Yes, yes, yes. That case is really fun. Actually, my favorite case is the one where we go to Maya’s village, that was a scary one. Do you remember the one with the parrot, leading up to the DL-6 Incident? Oh my god, that was so fire.” We’d go back and forth, and she showed me a weird investigation game she used to play on Facebook called Criminal Case. “It looks like shit nowadays, but that probably gave me the preparation for Ace Attorney when I did play it. When I played that game, I was so locked in. I think all I did for like 4 days when I was like 12 was just play Ace Attorney.” 

I’d eventually apologize for getting sidetracked, but fanned the flames anyway by bringing up Pokémon. “I played Diamond, I played X. I played Heart Gold, I played Gold. I played Fire Red, and I played the original Game Boy Red,” she counted. When asked her favorite, she thought for a moment before replying, “oh, I think Heart Gold, 'cause you get to see the Pokémon behind you when you walk, and that, for me, was very cute, you know? When you get to talk to them and it shows what they're feeling. I always thought that was awesome.” I showed her a picture of Marshadow when she asked my favorite Pokémon, and she told me Cyndaquil was hers. “Or, like, Typhlosion, but regular Cyndaquil’s are really cute.”

I asked her about a few more samples and easter eggs, like the K.K. Slider portion at the end of paper planes. “I thought about that in the last, like, 20 minutes of working on the song,” she mused. “The song used to just end on the last part, but I was like, I kind of want a video game thing in this album, you know? I always have a little video game nod in my albums. And there wasn't one in this one.” 

Laura admits to me that for her first five years of making music, she was sampling 90% of the time, and that she wished she started learning how to make her own melodies sooner. “Sometimes I'm like, damn, I was 15, 16 years old, making really bad music while people were, like, 12, 13, making crazy music. So I'm just like, fuck. Could have been better, but I'm trying to make up for it by being really good now, hopefully.” Nowadays, she has a less direct process when it comes to sampling. “Sometimes it will be like, I'm playing a game and I hear a song that I like, and I have a really nerdy moment where I'm like, okay, let me look this up on YouTube, download it and make a song on it. But sometimes I'm actively looking for stuff. I'll download a really big playlist of music and have it on standby. Or sometimes I'll wanna sample a really big song, but make it unrecognizable. I've been really into sampling Rihanna lately, but that shit gets you in the most trouble,” she chides. “I'm honestly probably gonna have a really in your face sample in my next rap album. One that’ll get me in trouble. I feel like music that’s careless like that is sometimes really raw, you know?”

After a brief pause to formulate a response to my next question, a thick-haired man starts blaring a(n honestly, really impressive) saxophone performance not far from where we sat together, rapidly drowning out her thoughts. In place of words, an exasperated laugh comes from her. “He’s playing the fuck out of that sax.” 

We decide to relocate without much protest from either of us, crossing the short expanse of concrete to find a bench alongside a decently empty road. It’d be a shadier spot, though that particular fact held little weight considering the skies were growing grayer, anyway, the sun almost fully tucking itself away beneath the expanse of dark, thickening clouds. Once we’d settled, I turned to ask her how she felt about her digital footprint, and what being on the internet as an artist for so long had taught her. 

“So much of my bad music on the internet is out there and it's like, people can just find it, you know? That’s kind of another reason why I changed artist names. Not that I'm ashamed of my music, but I would like to give people a cool first impression, you know what I mean? I don't want people to focus on anything but the music. I don't want people to even have anything to think about when they look at the names, I just want them to listen to the songs. So, yeah, I do have a lot of musical regrets or whatever. Stuff I wish I didn't do, songs I wish I didn't post, people I wish I didn’t talk to… I do take that kind of thing seriously, like just getting randomly cut off. A lot of people cut me off throughout the years and try to come back later on some friendly shit. It's like, people that sign, and they go like 3 years being really cold towards me. And then they get dropped from their label, and then they're like, ‘hey, remember me?’ I'm just like..” she raised a brow, tsk-ing.

Impatient cars screech down dampening asphalt in prelude to my next question, one regarding her basic process in making a song.

“It depends what kind of song I'm making. If I'm making a beat for a song, I always start by placing the bass notes, and then doing the chords off of that, and, the top melodies after. And if I think the beat sounds good enough, then I might feel compelled to sing on it, or just send it to people. I'm trying to make Lucy a pack. I'm hoping that they get on one of them.” 

At the time of our conversation, Lucy Bedroque had just released SPEED DEMON / WHITEHORSEMANNEQUIN a day prior, ahead of their anticipated upcoming album C. We talked about Lucy briefly, and after she asked if I liked the new music video, I asked her if she’d ever make one of her own. 

“I definitely want to, I’ve definitely had ideas in the past. What I want to do someday is make a music video for a really old song, like, I want to make a music video for online. It would definitely make people look at the song with a different view. I don't know, a music video can go a long way, I really do care about the imagery that comes with my stuff. And a music video is probably the best way to shape a world around the music,” she expressed. “I'm trying to work with an animator to do a music video for a song on my new album. He’s someone who has worked on, like, anime and stuff. He just randomly hit me up, and I didn't have anything else lined up for this album. I was gonna do a visualizer 3 days before I had to drop the album like I did last time.” She laughed when I made a face somewhat akin to disbelief. “Yeah, last time I dropped an album, i felt like a sketch, I did all the visualizers the day before.”

We talk more about her general process, and I throw a few questions at her from different angles– things like what about it is the hardest, to which she replies ensuring she isn’t being too harsh on herself, which part is the most consistent, her answer being developing a strong, catchy bass, and which she enjoys the most, bearing a confident response that she loves starting the songs, and hates finishing them. 

Somewhere between those answers, Laura’s trailing off, anxiously eyeing the darkening sky. “I'm so scared about this weather. I lost my train of thought with this shit, it looks like the world is about to end.” With almost cartoonish timing, thin little pellets of rain manifest from those taunting clouds, eliciting a sharp side eye from her to me. “Is that water? Rain?” I affirm her worry with a reluctant nod, and almost immediately, she starts to fumble with her roommate's umbrella she’d had tucked away inside of her bag– she’d just straightened her hair. We’d been trying to ignore the violent wind, but it seemed everything was becoming gradually more omnipresent at once. 

She struggles to get the umbrella open for a few moments more, and we’re eventually dragged to our third location, a nearby cafe to escape the apocalypse-esque weather. 

We make good time, the sky starting to fall down not long after we sat in a tucked away corner and put our orders in. She gets a matcha, to which I express my distaste, and I get a strawberry smoothie. We defrost with an abundance of conversation as we wait, talking extensively about our favorite older games and consoles, Animal Crossing villagers we disliked, and showing each other our favorite songs from the Pokémon soundtrack– hers being the Bicycle Theme from Pokémon Diamond, and mine the Boutique Theme from X. She eventually allows me a look at the tracklist for her upcoming album, and I compliment the album cover as I scroll through. 

“I've been working on it as soon as I finished my last one, around June 2025. It had a bunch of different names, a bunch of different cover arts, I don't know,” she trailed off, eventually smiling.  “I think I'm okay with it now.”

Conversation drifts back to her music, and I ask how she feels about some of her older projects. “Usually by the time an album hits the one year mark, I'm like, fuck this album. But I feel like I did pretty good on i felt like a sketch.” she begins, cut off by the very loud sound of a blender, coincidentally right beside the seats we’d chosen. I wince, knowing it’s most definitely at fault of the smoothie I’d just ordered, and she ricochets off of that with a laugh. “That’s your smoothie.” 

When the whirr of the blades die down, she continues, “Hopefully, with the knowledge I gain over the years, I can have less of those moments where I'm looking back at shit that I made a year earlier, hating it. I want to be able to make something and like it, even 4 or 5 years down the line. That's always been kind of what I strive for, but it was a little harder to think of longevity in terms of music in like, 2020, 2021. I was trying to do that, but I was also into every trend happening at the time, you know? I would just hear music and be like, I want to do this. But a bunch of other people were also doing whatever thing I wanted to do, too. That's how you end up getting grouped up and stuff, limiting yourself to a time capsule kind of thing. But my favorite music is just music that lasts a very long time, shit that you could listen to 5 years from now and be like, oh, yeah, that was actually a great song from the get go. So, I don't know. Just trying to strike that balance, I guess.”

Our drinks come out after a few moments, and she thanks our server before continuing. “I'm not as angry with my old music as people think I am, I think that's another misconception that people have about me. I don't really mind a lot of my old music. It's all fun music. That's what I try to look at it as when I'm upset at myself for making the songs, all fun at the end of the day.”

She lifts her cup to take a sip, but makes a sour face. “Lowkey, you’re right about matcha.” I grin, as if triumphant, and she fiddles around to look for the sugar. Upon reaching it, though, she triple checks to ensure it’s not salt, joking as I jab at her for it. “Dude, I've just made too many mistakes in my life. Once, for Christmas, my grandma put salt on the desserts instead of fucking sugar.”

We trail back off into miscellaneous conversation as she cuts at her dessert, my mouth pursing at points to alleviate focus from the occasional brain-freeze. At one point, my mom calls from across the country, and I awkwardly shove the phone towards Laura so she can give her regards. I’m quick to return to the questions, after that. 

“It takes time, you know?” she responds thoughtfully when I ask her something she wished fans would better understand. “I always feel like I need to apologize for taking too long and shit. I know it's people being excited when they're, like, ‘where the fucking album at?’ They're just being excited. They like my music. They want it. But, still, reading that feels like I have a big test coming up. Every time I'm ready to drop music, it feels like people are gonna grade it. So it takes a while, you know, to make the music good.”

She tries another sip of the matcha with copious amounts of sugar swirled in, affirming it tastes better this time around, and joking that she’s surprised she didn’t burn her tongue.

“Also, I guess I’m not really, like, a musician in the way that a lot of other people are, where I like posting stuff that I'm doing too much online,” she added, as if remembering the thought last minute. “So, people sometimes are like, ‘Oh, you're dead on social media, you don't do anything...’ It’s 'cause I was working on music in my room, like, what do you want me to post, a photo of my computer? And when I do go outside, I'm not really on some fit pic timing 90% of the time. And when I do post a fit pic, people in the comments are, like, where's the album? So it's just a cycle of like, okay, I have to work. That's what I think about every day, I have to work, and all the time I spend not working is fucking around time that I should feel bad for. But that’s a really bad mindset, and it was a lot more intense a few years ago. I've definitely grown out of it a little bit since moving here, but it's still what gets shit done.” 

We work on finishing our orders, and I lift myself up from the chair on a few accounts, peeking out of the glass to check on the rain that doesn’t seem to let up. She affirms with her weather app that we’re out of luck until 1:30 in the morning, so I reluctantly sit back to ask her my last few questions, one of which regarding anything she’d noticed once herself and her peers started to notice as they grew in both artistry and audience. 

“People take us a little more seriously now, you know? At first, a lot of people were doubtful. I remember in 2020 reading this one guy being like, ‘what are you gonna be doing in 5 years?’ Like, you will be nowhere in 5 years, basically, was what people were telling me. So I don't know, I feel like everybody that I knew would do good, is doing good. That's what I see with my peers. It's interesting to see your friends blow up, especially kuru, recently. It makes me feel like it could really happen whenever. Everybody tells you that you could just blow up one day, you know, but seeing people have a plan and watch it come to fruition is so cool. I think it makes people not only respect the person that blew up, but whoever is around them. So, I don't know, I feel like just producing for people, hanging out with people, being in this whole thing has gotten me some respect. So that's pretty cool.” 

By the time we reach my final question, I’m worried I’ve started to bore her. At this point, we were nearing the fourth hour of our conversation, but she answered my last question as earnestly as she answered the first. It was simple and generic, what piece of advice would you give anyone aspiring to make music, but she gave it deep thought before replying.

“You have to do it for yourself. A lot of people make music thinking they're gonna get something from it, expecting something. I would have been perfectly fine, if music never gave me anything. I would have been a little sad, yeah, but I would have been okay. I still would have continued to make it, because… I don’t know, I like having fun on my computer, I guess. I feel like you have to take risks. Definitely have your influences, but you should know what you like and make it your own. You gotta do something different from everyone else, and it's okay if you don't know what sets you apart at first. If you like music enough, I think it'll come to you naturally,” she suggested honestly. “And be consistent, because if you make it a routine, it becomes easier. Do it as casually as getting up in the morning.” 

After taking a few pictures together, we navigate through the downpour under a shared umbrella, taking the same subway route back to where we’d respectively came. She gets off a stop before me, but leaves me with that little drawing in my notebook to commemorate the day.

Laura is finishing up her second key vs. locket album, anticipating a late-September to early-October release.

Interviewed August 20th, 2026 in Manhattan, NYC