KennyHoopla has been going through it, to put it mildly.
After signing to a major label for his 2020 EP “how will i rest in peace if i’m buried by a highway?//,” KennyHoopla (real name Kenneth La’Ron) experienced a meteoric rise in popularity. Just the next year, he released a mixtape with Travis Barker of blink-182 and was hailed by Rolling Stone as the bridge between the pop-punk old guard and a Gen Z revival.
Four years later, having lived through the loss of his mother, his friends, and his record label, La’Ron is going back to basics. After this spring’s release of the aptly named “rebirth // renaissance,” the artist’s first EP after splitting ways with his label, and this fall’s “conditions of an orphan//,” KennyHoopla is heading out on tour again and feels like he is going to war with everyone’s expectations.
“I just did this tour with Soft Play, opening up, which felt really cool because I got to try all of these new songs on strangers and get an unbiased opinion,” La’Ron said. “And I had to fight for it. I had to fight for these ideas to get them to translate.”
For the KennyHoopla fans who got to know La’Ron early in his career as the second coming of a pop-punk messiah, these songs from his new EPs might feel more unfamiliar and challenging than his more pop radio-friendly hits like “estella//.”
It’s not that he’s abandoning the pop direction of his music, but he is leaning more into the influence of the 2000s European dance-punk bands he grew up on like Bloc Party, Phoenix and Two Door Cinema Club. This was always the music he wanted to make, but it required that he get beyond trying to play to other people’s tastes.
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“I’ve been trying to do that [dance-punk sound] from the beginning, but it was kind of hard to find people that were into that at the time,” La’Ron said. “But now I’m just trying to, I guess, not wait on people as much.”
As excited as he is to talk about his influences, La’Ron also feels like he is constantly fighting against the comparisons other people want to make with his music.
Early on in his career, he noticed that some members of the press would immediately make his interviews about other big-name artists who also happened to be Black alternative musicians like Dev Hynes of Blood Orange or Kele Okereke of Bloc Party. Over time, he has learned to be more confident in the uniqueness of his own voice.
That’s no small thing, given the larger-than-life reputation of some of his collaborators. Beyond his mixtape with Travis Barker, he also featured on the Bloc Party track “Keep It Rolling” in 2023 and recorded his most recent EP with Paramore’s Zac Farro.
Now that “conditions of an orphan//” is out, marking his 6th EP under the KennyHoopla name (if you count the mixtape), La’Ron is ready to turn his attention towards putting out his first LP. While it may seem like a long time to go without a full-length album, for La’Ron that’s the reality of being a full time working musician. There’s never the time to just be able to completely step away from the world and focus on writing an album in the way that he would like.
But that’s not stopping KennyHoopla. Anyone who spends time with his music is sure to notice the double slashes at the end of every title, and it’s not just an aesthetic tic. It’s a reminder from his childhood friend group that his time is still to come.
“When you talk about your dreams or whatever, getting out of or into wherever you want to go, it will always be, like, ‘Soon, soon,’ the word ‘soon,’” La’Ron said. “So I would just put ‘soon’ with the two slashes, and the two slashes ended up just meaning going forward and for there to never be enough or a never ending progress.”
