KiLLOWEN is still making beats in his bedroom

Normally when you’re writing a profile on someone, you’re trying to find out what makes them tick based on a thirty-minute Zoom call. It’s a bit different with Owen Pickston, who goes by the moniker KiLLOWEN. Our shoot with the 25-year-old rapper from Hayes means I end up spending a whole day with the guy. Within that, we go to Uniqlo to get him some new boxers, get told off by a park ranger at Hampstead Heath, and meet a witch — he didn’t piss himself, by the way. It’s a very British, Inbetweeners-esque sequence of events that feels fitting for someone who raps about suburban living rather than inner-city life. 

But it’s not until we sit down to have this chat – over a Guinness at The Stag’s Head in Soho – that I realise I didn’t have him down quite right. Since hearing “cook & effy” a few months back, I’d pigeonholed him as a kind of new-gen Mike Skinner — all semi-ironic wordplay for the TikTok generation. I was wrong. Owen tells me he doesn’t see the similarities between him and the man behind The Streets (“I do think we’re very different”) and I’d wholeheartedly agree. There’s certainly a “feeling”, as he puts it, that unifies the two of them. “Those first two albums really helped shape how I see life,” he says. “How I narrate things in my own head.” You hear glimpses of that on a track like “have the world your way”, but Owen is actually pretty singular. He’s also surprisingly introspective — that transcends the music too. 

Owen’s been rapping since his early teens, but he only dropped his first EP, Pub Therapy, in 2023. He’s got a healthy discography, though. I’m actually surprised by how many tracks there are beyond the ones that make the rounds on social media, with KiLLOWEN features popping up on songs with everyone from Songer to Tommy Villers. Of course, Owen sees it differently. “I feel like I’m behind compared to people because I’ve been rapping for ten or eleven years, but I didn’t actually drop a project until eighteen months ago.” He’s got a selective approach to releasing music. While Owen reckons that “since Pub Therapy got finished, [he] definitely made, like, over 150 songs,” he doesn’t see the point in “releasing too much music before people give a shit.” 

It’s fair to say that people do now give a shit, though Owen will be modest about that. After all, it was only fairly recently that he quit his job at Tesco to pursue music full time. “I remember lying about what I was going to do,” he tells me. “I was not about to go, oh, I’m leaving because I’m going to be a rapper — they’re not going to understand.” Owen has a certain nostalgia for stacking shelves at a “rare just Tesco” in Gerrard’s Cross — he’s acutely aware that no longer living a “super ‘get up and go to work’ life,” could stop his music being relatable to the experiences of most British twenty-somethings. “I feel like their experience must align with my experience,” he says. 

But while Owen doesn’t necessarily agree that he’s got a discography up there with his peers, he’ll admit that things are reaching a kind of peak right now. “I’m starting to realise, especially this week, that people fuck with the music more now than ever,” he tells me. When we speak, it’s just a few hours since his second EP, six missed calls, has dropped. The title for the record takes inspiration from when Owen had his phone stolen (“it ended up in Dubai a few days later”) while performing at Reading & Leeds 2024 — the video of him performing “One Thing”, where he raps over a remix of the Amerie song, made the rounds last summer. “I didn’t have a phone, but I got on one and got on Instagram, and I was looking at all the videos, and I was like, mad.” If it weren’t for that viral video, by the way, Owen probably wouldn’t even remember commanding festival stages that were once his teenage “rite of passage.” “It’s such an adrenaline rush — it’s what I imagine doing crack is like.” 

Back to the theft that was the catalyst for six missed calls, though. When Owen did get his phone back and saw all the missed calls and messages, he realised that he’d never “been without [his] phone for such a long period of time — thirteen years or something.” Like many of the twenty-somethings that Owen raps on behalf of, he’s had a youth mediated by technology and the EP is a kind of ode to that. It’s also an “analogy to show the growth” since Pub Therapy. Most of all, it’s a homage to the fans he’s built up along the way — they actually appear on a few tracks thanks to voicemails he’s been getting them to submit over the years. “Out of a hundred, I was able to pick eight,” he tells me. “It was a really good way of putting what I was saying in the music in a much more normal, very straight to the point way.” He did get some, as I put it, “mental” ones but Owen would “feel bad for airing people out.” 

One such voicemail, where a fan talks about trying to give up smoking, appears on “cook & effy”, which is a kind of classically KiLLOWEN, dance-y tune with Frankie Stew and Harvey Gunn. Another track in that vein comes in the form of “reason”, a heavy D&B number that Owen sees as a kind of spiritual successor to Luude’s song “96”, which featured himself and Songer. “We were able to do ‘reason’ off the back of that.” But elsewhere on six missed calls? Owen gets deep. “have the world your way”, which I liken to The Streets’ “Everything is Borrowed”, is basically a musical rendition of the way Owen sees the world. “I wanted to round off the EP and be like, yeah, everyone’s cool, they’ve got things going on, but you’re the boss of your own life,” he says. “As much as there’s a lot of things that are out of our control, the mood you wake up in and how you approach things can heavily dictate your experiences.” 

And “have the world your way” again muses on the fans. “I’ve got people depending on me that I don’t even know / The weight is heavy,” he raps. “You might change their life, or help them through things […] It means the music is making people feel like they know me, and I’m being very transparent. But also that comes with a weight.” Perhaps what Owen’s getting at is that fans have a certain accessibility these days. It comes back to the EP’s backbone — what it’s like to have your youth mediated by technology. “I thought, everyone likes to hate on phones, but let’s be real, it’s such a massive part of our lives,” he explains. “It’s gonna make its way into the art.” It certainly makes its way into six missed calls — as well as voicemails from the fans, you’ll frequently hear ringtones and bars on everything from “Uber prices” to 4K TV. 

As you can probably tell, Owen’s pretty diplomatic about everything — it’s a far cry from who you’d expect to be behind hits with all those Y2K, viral-ready cultural references. But it’s a worldview that he owes to his upbringing. Though he might have started off in West London, he was only eleven or twelve when he moved to Buckinghamshire. “I went from a place where a lot of people live in blocks of flats to not everyone being super rich, but some people in that area literally having mansions and shit.” He even recalls his mum telling him not to say where he was originally from. “It wasn’t that deep, but at the time she thought it was, innit? This is before I even understood life properly. I was already going, wait, this is half an hour down the road.” “I think that’s why I’m able to get on with a wide range of people,” he continues. “I feel like I grew up on both sides of the thing.” As Owen puts it himself, though he’s got London in his DNA, he’s not a Londoner. “I relate to the suburbs.” 

Growing up in Kent myself, I understand this implicitly. Owen gets it when I try to explain something I’ve dubbed “commuter belt-core”, that mundane reality of the home counties that gets dramatised in something like Skins. There’s a comedy to it even. Owen understands that as well: “Everyone likes to think, oh, you leave London and everything’s safe. But there’s still stuff going on. But it’s funny because it’s a bit less. It’s like the chavs down the road and they’re just laughable, do you know what I mean? Like, yeah, they might mug you, but it’s nothing serious.” There is, of course, a certain sense of humour to a lot of KiLLOWEN’s music — he’s managed to find himself a sweet spot between hard-hitting rap and the likes of someone like Niko B. But running through it all is his authenticity, which feels more than necessary when you’re coming up as a musician in the social media age. 

Though it would be easy to think otherwise with “pick your poison” and “One Thing” making the rounds on Instagram and TikTok, Owen’s always been keenly attuned to balancing viral success with artistic integrity. He learnt that most explicitly in the aftermath of his 2023 song “Sober”. “I kinda had that cloud over my head like, oh you’ve gotta do a million views again,” he tells me. “Over time I learned to detach from that […] viral music doesn’t mean it’s good music, do you know what I mean?” Now, he’s got a philosophy that’s all about building solid foundations rather than chasing internet fame: “If you built a house overnight, it would fall down in the morning.” Is it weird to have one of your songs used as background music for a #GRWM, though? “It’s just cool to see. It also gives you a visual gauge on who you’re reaching — even if it’s a 17-year-old kid wearing a Stüssy zip-up and he’s doing the techy little step and all that shit.” 

It’s not hard to see how Owen’s got himself his following. It’s not hard to see why he’s earned the respect of his peers either. “There’s a sweetness about having other artists that you like support you,” he explains. “Artists don’t tend to go, oh, that person had a big song, I love them. It’s more about their journey and their body of work.” Sceptics will still make themselves known (“Nine’s posted my music video yesterday […] all the comments were like, what the fuck is this shit”), but Owen brushes them off. It’s definitely not hard to see an album on the horizon, though he’ll take his time with it. “I want to feel like I can pull in who I want to pull in. Like, I could shout Mike Skinner and be like, verse?” I’d say he’d even have a good chance a little bit sooner. I mean, fuck it, right? As Owen himself would put it: “When you’re lying in your deathbed, you’re gonna be like, why the fuck did I care? You just gotta do your thing.”