Katie Toupin talks about rebirth the way some people talk about moving apartments—casually, a little wide-eyed, and with the quiet acknowledgment that she basically had to torch the old place to the ground first. “It wasn’t just leaving a band,” she tells me. “It was leaving my identity.” For the better part of her adult life, she’d been one-fourth of Houndmouth, the hard-touring, harmony-stacking Louisville crew she joined at 18. When she walked away, the question wasn’t what’s next? It was more who the hell am I now?
Her debut solo record Magnetic Moves is the answer—or at least the first one she’s ready to say out loud. It arrives after a long start-stop climb, a cross-country move, several failed attempts at making “the” album, and the uncomfortable process of figuring out what parts of herself were still there once the dust from Houndmouth finally settled. “I didn’t know who I was or what I liked outside of that world,” she says. “So everything took time. Finding my sound, my footing, my voice—it all had to be rebuilt.”
Los Angeles gets a surprising amount of credit in this story, though she laughs at the idea of any Hollywood sheen. “I needed a place where nobody knew who I was,” she says. “That struggle was an important part of the creative process.” The city became both a reset button and a mirror—sunny, strange, and neutral enough that she could fall apart a little without anyone asking if she was okay.
The real turning point came on a house-show tour. In Austin for a day off, she wandered into a studio called The Finishing School, run by the band of Shins/Chivas folks, and knocked out a song in an afternoon. No drama, no overthinking, just a song that finally sounded like her. “It had such a vibe,” she says. “I knew right then I had to make my record there. I realized I needed to produce it myself.” The search for a producer, the false starts, the multiple album attempts—everything snapped into place in a single painless session.
Once the songs started arriving, they arrived like confessions. Vulnerable, direct, and stripped of the imagery and metaphor she once hid behind. “I wanted it to be real,” she says. “There’s this added pressure coming out of a band like Houndmouth to please everyone, and you just can’t. Letting go of that was painful, but necessary.” The result is a record that doesn’t dodge emotion or gloss over the messy parts; instead, it leans in—romantic, sensitive, and unashamed. Toupin calls herself “a romantic romantic,” which is both redundant and absolutely correct.
Even the production experiments ended up telling a story. The spoken-word bridge in “Real Love” wasn’t planned. “I recorded a harmony behind the sung bridge and realized the spoken one was way cooler,” she says. It’s got a little Dolly, a little Lana, a little “young-person-hears-their-own-heartbeat-for-the-first-time.” She wants to do more of it. “It just hit a mood.”
The relationship threads throughout the album aren’t hidden either; by the time you hit the bonus track—“I’m Gonna Let You Go”—you feel the arc, whether or not the record follows strict chronology. “It touches on different perspectives of the same relationship,” she says. “It’s not linear, but it’s honest.” The heartbreak is real, but so is the self-reclamation happening alongside it.
And then there’s the title phrase—Magnetic Moves—which isn’t just romantic chemistry, but a whole life philosophy she had to learn the hard way. “It’s about your magnetism—what you attract,” she says. “The last three years, I’ve done so much work on myself. Spirituality, holistic stuff, manifesting a world I want to live in. What you think about, you bring about.” Spoken like someone who’s stared down the consequences of early-20s life choices and decided to write a new script.
Those early post-Houndmouth days were rough. “Not joyous by any means,” she says. “It wasn’t just freedom. It was scary. It was raw. I was lost.” Forced growth rarely feels heroic in the moment. But she’s also able to look back now and say the suffering wasn’t wasted. “Everything led to where I needed to go,” she says. “This record couldn’t have existed any other way.”
Every time she says she wasn’t trying, the best stuff seems to show up. That might just be the real magnetic move.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below!
