Kwn has never been one to turn her nose up at a job. She has worked night shifts at Sainsbury’s and chopped vegetables with her dad, the head chef at the Ivy in London. But her first day as an Amazon delivery driver in 2024 was soul-crushing. Only two years before, the singer, who goes by K Wilson outside music, had signed a deal and released her debut EP, Episode Wn. Now, she had been dropped from her label and was broke. Sitting in her van at the end of the shift, Wilson burst into tears.

“Be nice to your delivery drivers,” says the 26-year-old, shaking her head in dismay. “It’s not for the weak. By the time I got home, I was shattered. I don’t want to make music. What the fuck am I even gonna write about? Delivering packages?” Wilson lasted five months. Then, after failed attempts to whip up industry interest in her music, she hatched a plan with her manager to sell her next single, Worst Behaviour, directly to fans for £1.99. Five hundred sales would generate about a grand – enough to keep them afloat temporarily. Within a week, they had exceeded their target tenfold. Within a few months, Wilson was in record label boardrooms, listening to music executives pitch her path to stardom.

If the entrepreneurial release of Worst Behaviour catalysed Wilson’s industry comeback, it was the February 2025 remix with the US R&B A-lister Kehlani, and its accompanying music video in which the pair share a sensual kiss, that made her go viral: 33m views and counting. (Wilson declines to discuss her private life, but confirmed in October that they were dating.) Another EP, With All Due Respect, followed, building the kind of hype that led to award nominations and a headline tour across Europe, North America and Australia.

Being recognised by the Brits, Mobos, BET awards and Ivor Novellos has been nice, she says, but it doesn’t compare with selling out gigs. “You can fake streams, followers and likes, but bums on seats are different,” she says, sitting in the office of her new label, RCA. “That’s when you know you’re doing it for real.”

Not that fans at her shows spend much time sitting down. “They’re feral,” she says. That, in no small part, is probably because Wilson’s music seems engineered to release a rush of pheromones. Her songs are rooted in sumptuous, old-school R&B, the sound of her childhood in Walthamstow, London, as her two older sisters introduced her to artists such as Usher, Brandy and Boyz II Men. Wilson takes those artists’ seductive bedroom anthems and cranks them up a notch. On her latest EP, And All Pride Aside, she promises to pleasure her lover ’Til U Cry and ’Til the Room Stinks. And those are just the song titles.

“I’m never afraid of saying things, especially the explicit stuff,” she says with a smile. For all the raunchy bravado in her music – “I wanna strip you, grip you and flip you,” she sings on her recent single Touch Myself – Wilson is calm and measured in person. “It’s fun and kind of comical,” she says of her subject matter. When she asked her teenage hero Ty Dolla $ign to feature on ’Til the Room Stinks, he replied instantly with laughing emojis and asked: “How did you think of this?” The truth: a fan came up with the line in her TikTok comments.

Wilson’s way with words is perhaps more striking because she writes about women within a historically heteronormative style of R&B – more associated with 00s slow jams than the alt-leaning output of other queer artists today. But Wilson doesn’t have much time for labels. “I’m making music. I don’t go out and say: ‘Hey, guys, I’m a lesbian!’” She doesn’t believe her listeners care. “Some people don’t know how to take it on the first listen. But I don’t think me being a woman writing about women makes a difference.”

Besides, listen closely to And All Pride Aside and you’ll find more than steamy hedonism. The EP ends with Heaven’s in Your Hands, written shortly before Wilson’s grandfather died last year. “My whole family’s in pieces / And I’m here out in LA / I just wanna hear you say you’re proud / Of the woman I became,” she sings. The song poured out after a week-long bout of writer’s block. “After, I was driving somewhere at 1am and had it on repeat. I cried the whole journey. I needed the release.”

Maybe this is what Wilson’s music has been about all along. An older track, Lord I’ve Tried, was born from that period in 2024 when nothing was going to plan. This year, at a gig in Orlando, Florida, a fan handed out signs to hold up during the song. “The world is so much better with you in it,” they read. Wilson broke down again – only this time, she was in exactly the right place.

“It reminded me why I do this,” she says. “There’s a reason God has put me in this position. I want my music to make people feel something – and for them to remember I’m human. This is my first time doing life, same as anybody else.”