Name: Kara Amelie Romero
Born: 22 October, 1996 (Age 26)
Origin: Seville, Spain
Residing: Brooklyn, New York, USA
Genres: Hip-Hop, Rap, RnB, Pop, Alternative
Occupation: Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Model, Actress
Instruments: Vocals, Guitar, Keyboards, Synthesizers, Piano, Drums
Years Active: 2012 - present
Labels: Just Record // Dahlhouse Entertainment
Kara Amelie Romero (born October 22, 1996) is a Spanish American singer-songwriter, musician and actress. She was born in Seville, Spain to Rodrigo and Gabriella Romero, she was an old only child, her father was an agent for a number of Spanish actors and her mother was a caterer. Her mother sadly died when Kara was only four years old and she was raised alone by her father. At the age of eight years old, her father got a new job in Manhattan, New York and the two re-located to the United States, leaving their home comforts of Spain behind. Kara was raised bi-lingual, being raised speaking Spanish but also being taught English from a very young age, she has since stated that having moved to the USA at the age of eight years old, she now considers her first language to be English and very rarely speaks Spanish unless absolutely required. She has stated in interviews that when she hears herself speak Spanish, she only hears her mother’s voice and considered this too painful to continue speaking Spanish regularly, essentially dropping the language altogether. She has occasionally returned to her hometown of Seville to connect with family out there, but doesn’t like to do this often. Often stating that if she puts herself in that world that her mother lived in, she would find herself spiralling into a depression very quickly which is why she tries to separate herself from that childhood tragedy as often as she can in order to protect herself from descending into depression.
She has no brothers or sisters and zero family that lives in the USA other than her father who continues to work as an agent for a number of high-profile actors, although due to both of their busy lives, they rarely see much of each other. Essentially living separate lives from one another. Kara dropped out of school at the age of sixteen years old, despite being a relatively high achieving student. Her main passion was always within the arts, particularly performing arts whether this was music class or drama class as well as art class. She was part of a few different afterschool clubs in her early teenage years, but by the time she was around fourteen years old she began to waver from traditional educational structure and rules. It was at around the age of fourteen that she started hanging out with a different crowd, mostly a year or two older than her and began smoking and drinking. She became more of a rebellious teenager, often skipping school and hanging out on the streets in New York City, often late at night. She would later state that smoking and drinking at this age and hanging around with fellow misfits was her way of finding her own path as well as dealing with the demons inside her head.
It was at the age of fourteen where she began to really appreciate music and what it could do for her in terms of taking her on a different journey and into a different world than the issues in her own head. She delved into alternative rock, punk and grunge, becoming a big fan of bands like ‘The Replacements’, Husker Du’, ‘The Clash’, ‘The Ramones’ and ‘The Misfits’. As well as acts like ‘The Pixies’ and ‘Soundgarden’. But she considers her all time favourite band to be ‘Pearl Jam’ all of which feel a million miles away from the artist she would eventually become. Alongside her love of these guitar bands, she did find a love and influence from mainstream artists too like ‘Michael Jackson’, ‘Prince’, ‘David Bowie’ and ‘Tupac’.
At the age of fifteen she spent three months staying at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, New York following an argument with her father about alcohol and drug use. It was at this point where their relationship became frayed as she became a very difficult teenager to deal with as she started skipping school more and more often and would spend most nights out of the house, drinking and smoking as well as experimenting with drugs at this time. In late 2011 and early 2012 she began performing at open-mic nights around New York and was initially spotted in early 2012 during a performance at The Charleston in New York. A small buzz ensued online as clips of her performance went viral and Kara was given the chance to cut a couple of her songs, she headed into a recording studio with local producers Ignacio Santos and Will.Rocca to record her debut single “My Poison Ivy Lips”, an alt-rock track with heavy guitar riffs and drums, capitalising on the buzz online the track peaked at number four upon it’s release in February 2012 and she was taken on tour with Alicia Lena later that year, still unsigned to a record label but with people around her advising her at this point.
Proving difficult to control, she wasn’t able to agree on a record deal with any of the vast amount of suitors and her career stalled following her slot as an opening act on Alicia Lena’s world tour. There was a three year period where she essentially disappeared from mainstream attention, only occasionally performing at small clubs in and around the east coast of the USA, mostly confined to New York. She has later described this period as a time of intense recklessness, dealing with emotional distress from her childhood, to the abandonment of her father and living alone for the first time in her life. This was a period of heavy drinking and drug use that almost killed her on a number of occasions.
In 2015, almost three years after her brief moment of fame she eventually began steps to turn her life around in a positive direction, firstly signing her first ever recording contract with ‘Just Record’, which helped to give her structure and a solid career path ahead of her. They gave her the freedom to create music without boundaries, work at her own pace and figure out exactly what sort of style and genre she would find herself fitting into. Alongside a career path, they also helped her get into a strong therapy program that she has been part of ever since 2016 in which she has the tools to deal with her past trauma’s and psychological barriers in a healthier way than just using drugs and alcohol. Although she has maintained that she continues to use recreationally and has throughout the past six or more years while signed to ‘Just Record’. In discussing the impact the label have had on her life, she maintains that they very much saved her and that she wouldn’t still be alive if the team at the label hadn’t picked her up and helped her find focus.
Under the guidance and support of ‘Just Record’ she began sporadically recording and releasing more music and the freedom of that label to not force their artists into meeting deadlines, helped ‘Kara’ avoid certain pitfalls of pressure. Her first release under the label was a track in June 2015 titled “Down” which was not a successful effort, barely making the top twenty. But the track did see Kara experiment with Hip-Hop beats for the first time which would eventually manifest itself into her future career path as a fully-fledged hip-hop and rap artist. A million miles away from the artists that influenced her as a teenager, she began to slowly figure out her own path within the industry, but it took some time.
In 2016 she delivered four top ten singles, marking a positive improvement in fortunes for the budding artist, those tracks were “Same Old Tears”, “Perish”, “Where The Real Things Are” and “We Are One”. The latter of those tracks was a political and social statement which saw Kara tackling the serious topic of mass shootings which were a major talking point around that time, with the Charlie Hebdo incident being the most high profile as well as other high profile incidents in Charleston, Paris, Pakistan, Tunisia, Turkey, Belgium and Japan all of which were referenced in the song. The track wasn’t a massive chart success but saw the image of Kara changed slightly in the mainstream as she was a young artist that proved she wasn’t afraid to tackle important issues. She would go on to release her debut album “Do I Have Your Attention Now?” in 2016 alongside that string of singles and for the first time in her career, it felt like she was very much on the front foot, firmly establishing herself in the music industry.
Following on the back of her successful debut album and the rollout surrounding that, Kara delivered an E.P and a single in 2017, marking a less than productive period for a number of years following. In 2017 she delivered “Bulletproof Barbie” a single that peaked at number four and an E.P titled “Raising Hell” which peaked at number three and consisted of tracks that were supposed to be released years earlier during her debut year in 2012.
Kara then took an unplanned period away from the music industry, preferring to focus on herself for a while. During this period out of the spotlight, she stepped up her therapy and found herself at her healthiest both mentally and physically. She continued to live in New York, spending time living her life as fully as she could, knowing that when the time came to get back to recording and releasing music she would be in the best position to get back to it. During this three year period of not releasing any music, she took a two month journey across the United States and temporarily re-located to California before returning home to the west coast of the United States. She also returned to her homeland of Spain on a number of occasions and managed to reconnect with her family, including her father during this period of absence.
She didn’t return to the spotlight until 2020 which saw the first steps into this new era of ‘Kara Romero’, she marked her return with a track titled “Cruel As Shit” in May 2020, the track peaked at number four and saw the first glimpse into this new introspective version of Kara in which she puts herself front and center, flaws and all. She followed this up firstly with the release of her second E.P in June 2020 titled “The Therapy Sessions (Vol. I)” which peaked at number three. The E.P saw Kara delve into the themes and ideas that were tackled during her own real life therapy sessions. One final single came in 2020 with “Are We One?” (feat. Jay-C and Stephanie Fierce). The track was a reworked version of her 2016 social statement “We Are One” and this time tackled the George Floyd murder and as well as other murders of black people at the hands of police, the single peaked at number five and raised a large amount of money for various “BLM” charities.
The worldwide coronavirus pandemic briefly halted Kara’s plans to continue to record and release music and it wasn’t until 2022 that she was able to finally get into a recording studio to work on her sophomore album. She began the recording sessions in January 2022 and delivered the first glance of the upcoming album with June 2022 release of “Signpost” which gave Kara her first ever number one single, it also showed Kara continuing with the introspective nature of her song-writing, establishing those ideas first shared in her 2020 releases. She quickly followed up the lead single with a remixed version of the same track which would now feature a guest spot from ‘Brayton “Bellows” Carter’, a long-time friend of hers from the popular rap group ‘Orion’, that version of the track peaked at number five on the charts.
She would go on to release another three singles in 2022 in the build up to her sophomore album, those tracks were “When Will We Get Our Flowers”, another social statement song about female empowerment in the aftermath of the ‘Roe v Wade’ decision over abortion rights in the United States, the track peaked at number one and raised a large amount of money for it’s charities. She followed that single up with “Hit List” which peaked at number two and ended the year with the release of “DTF” (feat. Younghood) which also peaked at number two, marking her most productive and successful year in her career to date.
In early 2023 she released another single “Twenty-Four Seven” (feat. Drew Westbrook) in the build up to her sophomore album, which would be announced to be released in early 2023, with a major 2023 world tour being announced to support the record after it’s release. Marking the culmination of Kara’s rise in the music industry to finally be announcing her first solo headline world tour.
DISCOGRAPHY;Studio Albums;•
"Do I Have Your Attention Now?" (June 12, 2016) [#1]
•
"Post Traumatic" (February 4, 2023) [#1]
Singles;• “My Poison Ivy Lips” (February 12, 2012) [#4]
• "Down" (June 28, 2015) [#16]
• "Same Old Tears" (January 23, 2016) [#2]
•
"Perish" (February 14, 2016) [#2]
•
"Where The Real Things Are" (March 27, 2016) [#3]
•
"We Are One" (April 23, 2016) [#8]
•
"Bulletproof Barbie" (April 17, 2017) [#4]
•
"Cruel As Shit" (May 24, 2020) [#4]
•
"Are We One?" (feat. Jay-C & Stephanie Fierce) (June 19, 2020) [#5]
•
"Signpost" (June 11, 2022) [#1]
•
"Signpost" (feat. Bellows) (June 26, 2022) [#5]
•
"When Will We Get Our Flowers" (July 16, 2022) [#1]
•
"Hit List" (October 29, 2022) [#2]
•
"DTF" (feat. Younghood) (December 31, 2022) [#2]
•
"Twenty-Four Seven" (feat. Drew Westbrook) (January 22, 2023) [#1]
Features;•
"Model Citizen" (feat. Kara Romero, Kidd Amaze) (March 8, 2024) [#1]
E.P’s;•
"Raising Hell" (April 30, 2017) [#3]
•
"The Therapy Sessions (Vol. I)" (June 13, 2020)[#3]
FILMOGRAPHY;•
"One Final Memory" (2016)
AWARDS;• FCA VII - Best Female Artist [2020]
• Universal Music Award - Best Touring Artist [2024]
• Universal Music Award - Album of the Year [2024]
• Universal Music Award - Artist of the Year [2024]
TOURS;•
Alicia Lena - "Reign Over Me" World Tour (2012)•
Just Record - "Welcome to the Show" Tour (2016)•
Reckless Infinity Tour (2016)•
Rum & Coke - "The Family" World Tour (2022)•
Kara Romero - "Post-Traumatic" World Tour (2023)