Ashnikko - Smoochies (2025) Hi-Res

The 29-year-old singer/rapper blew up on TikTok with her 2019 breakthrough hit “STUPID”, joining the pantheon of defiantly bawdy, cyborgian e-girls. On her second studio album, which follows 2023’s apocalyptic WEEDKILLER, Ashnikko hones her pop songwriting chops while valiantly striving to kill her inner It Girl. (See “It Girl”, a decaying folk song about rejecting the allure of external validation.) On Smoochies, she recruits a crack team of weirdo-pop producers (long-time collaborator Slinger, plus Elvira Anderfjärd, Luka Kloser and Tove Burman, who wrote and produced Addison Rae’s 2025 debut) for sweet, tough and distinctly modern love songs. “I want you in my body like microplastics,” she sings on “Microplastics”, and on “Trinket” she collects boys like Labubus and dangles them from her purse. On “Smoochie Girl”, she wonders over glitchy sugar-rush synths: “Is this too much to keep a lock of your hair in a resin ring? Is this too much? I wanna take out my IUD.”

Among goth/scene/anime fandoms, Ashton Casey, better known as Ashnikko, is an unusually disciplined songwriter. She's a salaciously original rapper, even in a crowded post-Nicki/Cardi landscape, who tends towards the queer and kinky. And as an alternate-timeline pop star she's freaky in the best way. Her 2021 "mixtape" Demidevil turned out to be a fully realized masterpiece with some of the catchiest tunes of the young decade ("Deal With It" with its steel drums and Kelis sample; "Daisy" with its Arabic scale motif reminiscent of Timbaland-Aaliyah) as well as the horniest (the Princess Nokia duet "Slumber Party;" the 90-second "Clitoris! The Musical," where a clueless boy has been "rubbing the same spot on my leg for ten minutes"). The "official" 2023 follow-up, WEEDKILLER, leaned into her spookier, less tuneful side with highlights like the "Black Skinhead"-esque "Chokehold Cherry Python" and the "Daisy"-esque title track.

Ashnikko's second official full-length, Smoochies, slithers back towards streamlined electropop without sacrificing filthy fun, just never where you'd expect. "Full Frontal" refers to her lobe, for instance, lobbying for a lobotomy to grant her wish for a brain "smooth as a chicken breast." But in the same song she also wants the DJ to "sit on my face so I can feel the beat." Meanwhile, "Microplastics" turn out to be what she wants you in her body like, and "Sticky Fingers" is more visceral than anything on the Stones classic. "Itty Bitty" refers to the size skirt she likes to wear "every time my heart hurt." The great, self-explanatory "I Want My Boyfriends to Kiss" is her bid to score an opening slot on Peaches' comeback tour, and this overall venture towards sleeker, more minimalist (and raunchy) club music, from house to electroclash, might well find her a home there. But she's long been overdue to conquer the charts, too—even if it happens in another dimension.