Madame Reaper/Photo: Shawn Ruddy
Only four years ago, journalist Kira Leadholm was covering Lollapalooza backstage in the press area, interviewing musicians, when she had an epiphany. She realized she didn’t want to be backstage, she wanted to be onstage. “That’s really when I started to dig into my music career,” she says now.
Leadholm, who has since adopted the stage name Madame Reaper, credits her journalistic background for giving her exposure to “local, national and global issues that I aim to address in my songwriting. I think this is a big reason my project has an activist undercurrent.”
While she clarifies that she hasn’t worked in journalism for a few years, she says that “a big reason I pivoted away from it” is that “the state of journalism today is bleak. My friends who still work in journalism are paid next-to-nothing to work the worst hours and do a job that’s physically and mentally taxing. Billionaires own major news outlets and are dictating editorial choices to suit their interests. Meanwhile, a massive portion of Americans get their news from social media, which breeds misinformation. None of this is a secret,” she concludes, “and yet we aren’t acting with enough urgency to change the situation.”
Madame Reaper’s musical urgency is palpable, pulsing through the ten gothic synthpoppy songs on her second record, “This is an album because the industry says it’s not,” released in April. Nowadays she’s doing all she can to distance herself from “The Gentlemen’s Club” part of the moniker. Given that this is really her solo act, she always plays with a band, but it’s not always the same people, depending on schedules, and from a practicality standpoint, it’s much easier to fit “Madame Reaper” on a poster, she relates.
I ask Leadholm to take me back to before her 2023 self-titled debut, so she can “fill in the blanks” a bit regarding the creation of the Madame Reaper character.
“When I started the project, I knew I wanted to separate my stage persona with who I am in my everyday life. I think doing so helps me be a better performer, because I’m acting as a character, and it also helps keep my private life a little more private. I also knew I wanted my stage persona to address the themes that I discuss in my music—sexism, class discrimination, and consolidation of wealth in the United States, to name a few. So, I got to work on making up a character that checked those boxes.”
With her undergraduate degree in creative writing and a specialization in fiction, she says, “I have a lot of experience creating characters out of thin air. I drew on a lot of those skills when I made up Madame Reaper. I asked myself a million questions like ‘what does she eat for breakfast?’ (Whiskey and cigarettes at 2pm.) Or ‘what did her parents do for work?’ (They were Midwestern farmers.) Though most of this information will never see the light of day, it helped me build out a fully-fledged character.”
Musically, Madame Reaper’s sound is couched in 1980s synthpop (amusingly, she calls it “vampire synthpop” on her Instagram profile), and Leadholm freely admits that has been her chief musical inspiration. I’m hearing a lot of ABBA-like sounds on her latest release, but she seems like the type who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, so I choose to “dance around” that idea, telling her I heard more of a 1960s sound on her debut album, and hear more of a 1970s sound on her latest outing. Thankfully, she confirms that I’m not entirely wrong, and best of all, correct in what I was hearing.
“This is an album because the industry says it’s not.”/Cover art: Kyle La Mere
“My first album has certain songs, like ‘Oh Penny,’ where I intentionally wanted a sixties girl group sound à la the Ronettes. I also listened to a lot of the Zombies, Velvet Underground and The Doors when I was writing that record, which I think comes through in some of the instrumentation. ‘This is an album’ sounds a lot like ABBA, which is quintessentially 1970s. I was also influenced by disco instrumentation on songs like ‘Olympia.’”
Whew.
Although Leadholm writes much of her music with her partner, guitarist Kevin Sheppard (member of Girl K, Burr Oak, etc.), she pens the lyrics exclusively, bringing in her journalistic background to craft stories in her songs, complete with characters, setting and narrative in mind.
When asked to point to songs on her second record that particularly address the current political situation in the United States, she says “probably all of them.” “Lyrically, I address political issues pretty obliquely, because I like to give my listeners space to come up with their own interpretations rather than handing them the meaning.” Having said that, she says if “you watch my music videos, come to my shows, or follow me online, it’s pretty easy to know where I stand.”
“I think each song [on the record] tackles a different side of capitalism,” she continues, “and it’s all filtered through my point of view.” Examples she cites include “Feast” (which is “all about challenging the patriarchy and traditional gender roles”), and “Falling apart again” (which “addresses the intense emotions I feel as a result of everything going on in the world”). Reflecting on those emotions, she refers to a lyrical moment in “Dauphine,” which uses the French Revolution as an analogy for class struggles today, when she sings “All the people they want my head/I can’t be king anymore.” “Obviously,” she explains, “I wrote this before Trump 2025, but the sentiment was that people who hold political power are overstepping the bounds of their roles. This rings even truer now.”
Of all the songs on “This is an album because the industry says it’s not,” she calls “Utopia” “the most obviously political song.”
“I wrote it during the summer of 2023,” she recalls, “when the air quality in Chicago was the worst in the world due to Canadian wildfires. [Note: Until Chicago returned to the record books as the worst on July 31, 2025!] I was feeling really frustrated with the political precedent of business as usual and the narrative of American exceptionalism. I wanted to write a song that sonically reflects the tension between the ‘American utopia’ touted by politicians and the reality experienced by the public.”
Leadholm’s looking forward to when the music video for “Utopia” debuts next month, calling it “a campy, over-dramatized enactment of what the song is about—political power and the state of the United States. It also touches on my background in journalism and how I feel about the state of the media, so it’s fitting you asked me about those topics.” She also promises that her roommate and “resident music video czar,” Shawn, animated “some crazy footage—there will be aliens, tornados, murderers and more. I can’t wait for everyone to see it.”
If it’s as visually arresting as her other music videos and the Cindy Sherman-inspired album cover photo for her latest release, it will definitely be a “must see.”
Madame Reaper/Photo: Shawn Ruddy
The album concludes with “Take My Hand,” although Madame Reaper says it was actually “the first song I wrote on the album, I think in late 2022.” But when she finished producing and mixing the demo, “my partner and guitar player Kev said, ‘This feels like your first album; you could do better.’ I rehauled the whole thing, and I’m really proud of the end result. I chose to put it last because it’s more indicative of the musical direction I’m going in as opposed to where I’ve been. It’s a very electronic, very dancey song, which is what I’ve been most interested in lately.”
Importantly, she adds, “It’s also one of the few happier songs on a relatively pessimistic album. I wanted to end the album optimistically, so listeners aren’t like, ‘Fuck, now I’m depressed,’ after streaming the whole thing.”
Even though the subject matter might be grim at times, it’s hard to imagine a user feeling depressed after playing this record end to end, or even out of order, for that matter. It’s a rocking and dance-y good time musically, and if that helps Madame Reaper better communicate her point, then we’re all the better for it.
Having freshly returned from a short European Union tour and opened a show at The Burlington earlier this month, she’s already started working with Pixel Grip’s Jon Freund to produce her next album.
Madame Reaper plays Thursday, August 21 at Schubas Tavern, 3159 North Southport, opening for Tommy Bravos; Little Church headlines. This is an 18+ show. Doors open at 7:30pm; show at 8pm. Tickets are $13 plus fees in advance, available at lh-st.com; $15 plus fees at the door.
Craig Bechtel is a freelance writer and has also been a Senior Staff Writer for Pop’stache. He is also a DJ, volunteer and Assistant Music Director for CHIRP Radio, 107.1 FM, and contributes occasionally to the CHIRP blog. As DJ Craig Reptile, you can hear him play music on the FM dial or at www.chirpradio.org most Sunday nights from 6pm to 9pm. He previously worked in radio at KVOE AM and Fox 105 in Emporia, Kansas, and served as a DJ, music director and general manager for WVKC at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he also won the Davenport Prize for Poetry and earned a B.A. in English writing. Craig has been working in various capacities within the hotel and meetings industry for over twenty years, and presently works at a company that uses proprietary systems to develop proven data strategies that increase revenue, room nights and meeting attendance. In his spare time, he also fancies himself an armchair herpetologist, and thus in addition to a wife, son and cat, he has a day gecko and a veiled chameleon in his collection.