All clothing, accessories, and jewelry by LOUIS VUITTON.

There is a certain silence when we meet. It’s a comfortable one, but it’s wordless and still nonetheless. Even the trees are unmoving in the breeze, like they are also waiting for us to begin. On the cusp of her twenty-sixth birthday, artist, songwriter, and Louis Vuitton muse, Lous and the Yakuza, is in Los Angeles, away from her home in Belgium, continuing to foster her sound. We converge on a Saturday afternoon over tea on her terrace somewhere in the hills, posed on a picnic table where we can see the greenery reflected off the pool. The first few moments are filled with nothing but the sound of plastic unwrapping from the pack of Camels she holds in her hand, and the flicker of the lighter. Born Marie-Pierra Kakoma, the Congolese-Rwandan-Belgian artist known for diaristic sounds and storytelling lyricism had to first understand the art of silence.

Lous takes a sip of her tea, “I meditate in intense silence, just quiet, trying my best not to be thinking,” she says. “Then, I believe I say grace because I feel grateful to be alive and healthy.” We sit and listen to the breeze, both enjoying the air not yet tainted by the city, absorbing the natural sounds of the earth. “And then I immediately start thinking about work,” she laughs. And it’s true—she has been busy.

At the end of 2020, Lous released her debut album, Gore, an autobiographical account of the journey she has endured towards self-discovery, acceptance, and ascension. When she was just a child, her family moved to Belgium, fleeing the Second Congo War. They spent a brief time in Rwanda, before permanently moving to Brussels, and she’s since transposed her memories, experiences, and dreams from her childhood into deeply felt lyrical retellings.

While Lous does write about the consequences of war, the trials of youth, and the depravity that waits for us, her seraphic voice softens the torment she writes of, tangled together on a bed of lush soundscapes sewn with trap-style beats and R&B sentiments. The 10-track effort includes her standout single, “Dilemme,” which speaks of the sacrifices we might encounter to keep ourselves safe. She sees self-isolation as freedom, allowing her to untie herself from the constraints of external expectations or desires. “I write everything that’s in my head. Everything I haven’t really talked about,” she confesses. “I realize that my music is really all the things I’m not able to say in real life. I don’t really talk about my feelings in real life.” She approaches writing as less a means of catharsis, but more a reflection of what she sees, or a message to somebody she knows. “Music is literally the place where I express everything,” Lous admits, “I feel like a song is always clear in what it says.”

Ready to become anew, Lous and the Yakuza sets free old sentiments and makes way for topical subject matter she has yet to explore lyrically. “Gore was from the horror movies and everything, and was literally what the first album is about. It’s about being in the street, rape, war, and all these things. But I missed talking about love.” She divulges, “It’s my favorite thing. I feel like I wanna give space for love.” Her arms are open wide, physically making the space for the love to creep in. “I wanna be talking for the next two years about love.”

Fittingly, her latest release, “Kisé,” speaks of how quickly love can take form and bloom, but also how it can just as quickly be lost. She repeats, “kisé”—or ‘who knows’ in English—questioning how the passage of time and how fleeting our feelings can truly be. Because no one can predict the tides of the heart, Lous shares how love is kismet no matter what the ending might be. “Love could be a beautiful thing, if you work on it, and if you also have the gravity to let go, which I think is the hardest thing—to let go.”

An anagram for soul, Lous always looks within for guidance and reassurance. “In French, we say ‘aime’ and ‘esprit.’ We say you have three things: body, soul, and spirit. For me, they are the three parts of any type of human,” she explains. “There’s always real bodies, like your blanket—what protects your soul.” I ask her the difference between spirit and soul. She takes a sip of tea and expresses, “For me, my soul is what’s in me as feelings and what makes me a human—my feelings, my anger, my pain, my happiness, my euphoria, my joy, my hatred—everything, that’s my soul. Then my spirit is spiritual and it’s intellectual—my spirit will be the thinking, the voice of reason.” She takes a drag, looking at what is lit between her fingers, “Every time I smoke a cigarette, my spirit will be like, ‘Why do you do this?’ And my soul is like, ‘Because it’s fun!’” she laughs. “And my body’s like, ‘Let’s not do this forever.’”

The idea of forever is daunting, and the place where we go after remains a mystery for those who believe in an afterlife. But for Lous, it is not where we go that haunts her, or even her own humanity. No, she seems to have it all figured out. “I believe we exist before we exist on this planet, and I believe after we leave this planet, we still exist. Even in the most biological way. I’m going to de-compose. With my body, I’m gonna nurture the ground, and something else is gonna be born from it, which is literally pure science.”

We look at how the leaves blow in the wind, how the wind turns tides in the pool, how the pool reflects our shadows, and we partake in a quiet moment of clarity, both understanding our inevitable endings, but also the beauty of the cycle. “This is how I’m gonna live forever. All of these,” and she points to a nearby tree, the brush that envelopes the hills, the nearby flowers crying for spring, “...all of these are people decomposed at some point. It’s crazy that we think it’s gross or scary because it’s literally life.” When we think of death, we do so in hushed tones and with our hands covering our eyes. But Lous attests, “We all know that we’re gonna die, so we’d better be at peace with it. I’m at peace with it. I’ll die whenever I die.”

With Gore heavily inspired by the consequences of war, heartbreak, and the misgivings of inequality, Lous’ intention is to create evergreen compassion. Over her last sip of tea, she says, “I hope by telling these super-dark stories, whether it was about me or somebody else, I hope people take away empathy—in the way that people look at each other. And that’s why it’s so important to have all these stories out there—we finally have all these people free enough to tell this story. And me telling my story has created so much empathy in other people’s lives.”

It’s a natural force and unexplainable energy that allows her to write about her past with such ease and grace, and almost in a way where it can finally be released. She shares, “It’s super strange, you don’t even really think about what you’re writing when you’re writing. You just write with some kind of epiphany, some kind of superior force that makes you put words in a certain order, making you do certain melodies.” We start collectively listing things that rhyme with you, like ‘clue,’ ‘glue,’ and ‘new.’ Maybe it’s the sense of repetition of rhymes that makes them so comforting, or the fact that it makes the end of lines in a song more familiar. Whatever it is, Lous does not have a process or system or order when it comes to creating her rhymes and lyrics. She only knows that she’s driven by feelings, images, and the person she wants to talk to the most. “Sometimes he’s just an image, sometimes he’s in the landscape. Sometimes it’s a word someone said to me, and it’s super inspiring. Sometimes it’s a conversation with friends or strangers.” She looks at me and ad-libs about the color pink. “Everything is inspiring. Colors are super inspiring.”

At only twenty-five, Lous and the Yakuza glides over the earth as if she has been doing so for millennia. She shares that her commitment to stillness is her continuing path to knowledge and spiritual growth. “I keep saying this, but I’m super committed to silence. I swear.” Knowingly and playfully she says, “I talk a lot when I talk like right now talking to you. But when I don’t talk, I don’t say a single word. It can last for six hours.” She takes another drag. “And all the six hours of me not talking, I allow myself to evolve.”

In times of healing, Lous shares that silence can be just as comforting as the noise of the everyday. And it’s easy to let the noise consume us, not letting us listen to our thoughts, or allowing us to think about anything that is not right in front of us. Though Lous is in touch with her innermost self through the ways of stillness and quietude, she remarks, “Sometimes we just try to avoid who we think we are. As you said, the robotic thing happens so much in music.” And maybe by saying less, our words take precedence and become more intentional. She affirms, “Words are important. I wouldn’t be able to give love and all the thoughts I have in an organized way, in the same way I’m divulging all of this to you, if I did not shut up. I need to think. “

With her tour closely approaching, I ask Lous about the least quiet part of her life. She sees herself as fearless, but she recounts how the moments before entering the stage might be where she is the most fearful. She puts her empty mug on the table with a clap. “I put one step on stage, and I’m like, ‘That’s why I have to do it in public! It’s because it’s amazing! We’re sharing! And it’s crazy.’”

Said tour will see Lous traveling through Belgium and France this summer, as well as supporting Alicia Keys and Gorillaz in some of the most iconic venues. With inimitable energy, she says, “[I feel] so at home. I can’t wait to do shows and just dance and be my most…” she looks beyond the trees. “The part that I don’t get to see myself be. I’m 25,” she says, now looking at me, “and 99% of the time, I have to be super strict and serious, talking about serious shit all the time.” She holds her final cigarette between her fingers, not yet bringing it to her mouth. “And then you have this 1%. I can be reckless and you know…” Then silence. I interject, offering, “Completely uninhibited?”

She smiles. “Exactly! In life, I’m not really spontaneous anymore. There’s not much space for that.” But at this point in the day, I believe I know Lous well enough to say that this might not be completely true—I take Lous and the Yakuza to believe that love is the most spontaneous thing. She smiles, “I’m in love all the time.” Because love doesn’t always refer to romantic desire, but maybe the moment you lock eyes with a stranger, or the way you can watch hair dance in the wind for hours… “Falling in love means you’re not ready for it,” Lous says, laughing, “and I fall in love quite a lot.”