The story of H. Kink's Karate - and of H. Kink, period - begins with the fateful meeting of kindred creative spirits Lisa Rieffel and Timm Sharp at a house party in Los Angeles, 20 years ago. Rieffel was a Jersey-born actress with a ton of TV credits under her belt (and a stint in a punk band back East); Sharp, from Fargo, was an actor, too, starring at the time on Judd Apatow's Undeclared. But it was music, not TV, that sealed their bond: By night's end they'd written their first song together and formed a band, Killola - a band Sharp didn't stick around in for long but that Rieffel still fronts today. But that's another story ...

H. Kink's story picks up at another party, 15 years later. With Killola on hiatus, Rieffel asked Sharp if he wanted to try writing again. Now fully committed to acting, he demurred - but offered to send her some tracks he already had to see if anything sparked her muse. "They were just these random instrumentals that I'd written over the years, never thinking they'd see the light of day," Sharp recalls. "But what Lisa did with them became the first H. Kink album."

That album, 2019's Wish I Were Here, packed an obscene amount of fun into 32 dizzying minutes, jerking madly from bathroom disco to rock, electro-punk, and even a hint of country. Equally wild were the accompanying videos, including the demented Sesame Street-on-acid trip of "It's Yours" and "I'm Nice Like That," a subversive parody of cable commercials that sizzled hotter (and funnier) than a 1-900 sex line.

Alas, Rieffel and Sharp's first crack at H. Kink was as short lived as their first time working together in Killola; after a morale-busting incident with a shyster agent (long story), Sharp wanted out. Determined to carry on, Rieffel took a cue from the first album's feisty country outlier, "Hit the Road," and recorded the retro-tinged EP Men. with Killola producer Luke Tierney, followed by a bone-chilling cover of Radiohead's "Creep" with another friend, Michael Tritter. But one heartfelt call from Sharp in 2022 was all it took to get the original duo back together, leading to the most kick-ass H. Kink project yet.

"It just felt like returning home," enthuses Rieffel. "Not to be schmalzy, but it felt like everything that had happened just brought us closer."

Don't let those warm reunion fuzzies fool you, though: Karate pulls no punches. It's sassy as hell and tons of sonic fun, a suicide cocktail of punk snarl, serrated pop, and psychedelic disco. But Rieffel's words in songs like "Once in a While," "Good Stuff," and "Monster" make clear this is a woman who knows from darkness - and how to use it.

"It's about being almost paralyzed for the last two years, but then fighting your way through and coming out a monster, and embracing that monster," she says, speaking not just for herself, Sharp, and H. Kink, but for all of us. "That's Karate."
- Richard Skanse