As a teenager, she began a journey into pop music, posting song covers of artists including Justin Bieber and Julia Michaels to Instagram.
[7] Years after she had attended the school in Singapore, she was contacted by former classmate Luc Bradford, who had become a music producer under the name Ford.
She wrote the lyrics and Ford produced it, and after releasing it, Kinsley said that although it gave her good contacts in the music industry, she received "twisted" compliments since she was just a feature on the song, with no input into the production.
Kinsley studied music theory at Columbia University, and as part of her assignments, she was expected to produce and record songs, which she also released publicly.
[1] On June 4, 2021, Kinsley released the extended play (EP) The King, the title track of which went viral on TikTok.
[8][9] NME's Sophie Williams praised the EP; she found Kinsley's vocals and storytelling to be the highlights.
Despite finding it to be a short EP at 20-minutes long, Williams opined that Kinsley had "meticulously crafted" the project.
Herself and her family went to California, where she was born, to escape from "the noise" of the press interviews, media and people's opinions.
[3] It was there that she formed the idea for her next EP to be bodied around "unravelling, the growth of uncertainty, the unknowing", and she felt that "Hills of Fire" embodied that.
She explained that she wants to create "juicy, sweet, daring, open, intimate, full songs that have no bounds" in the way that Lorde did on Melodrama.