There is a quiet kind of grief that many Black women know all too well. Yet, sometimes the most powerful art is born from unimaginable loss. For Atlanta-based neo-soul and Hip-Hop artist King Cooley, tragedy became the catalyst for a creative rebirth that is now resonating far beyond music. Read on to learn about how she found beauty within the tragedy with her new album KILN: Forged Through Fire. 

The journey of grief is interesting, with many forms of grief left unspoken. The release is even more understated. It is the grief of watching a career you’ve poured yourself into suddenly disappear. It is the grief of losing the place that once felt like home. It is the exhaustion of constantly having to reinvent yourself in a world that asks Black women to be resilient without ever making room for us to rest.

As layoffs continue to reshape corporate America, Black women remain among those most vulnerable to economic instability — often experiencing higher unemployment rates and fewer opportunities to recover after job loss. According to Fred, 5.6 percent of Black women over 20 years old are faced with the reality of job loss. For many, the pressure to immediately “bounce back” leaves little space to actually process what has been lost.

Atlanta artist King Cooley knows that feeling intimately.

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Within a short span of time, the award-winning creative director, neo soul and hip hop artist lost both her apartment in a devastating fire that displaced more than 200 Atlanta residents and her corporate career. Instead of allowing those moments to become the end of her story, she created something entirely new.

Released on June 25, KILN: Forged Through Fire has transformed a devastating experience into an album that fans can relate to in so many ways. It is Cooley’s personal love letter to survival. A meditation on grief. A reminder that healing is rarely linear.

“I’ve had a major perspective shift,” Cooley disclosed to HelloBeautiful. “I feel equally disillusioned as I do liberated. The truth is, I knew I was outgrowing those environments but staying out of comfort and fear.”

King Cooley goes on to share that though she loved her place, the apartment was far too small and she didn’t even enjoy the building’s management staff. While her salary was comfortable, the job didn’t value her skills and continuously tried to co-opt her experiences as a Black woman. 

“My lifestyle was not at all aligned with what I kept saying I wanted — creative freedom, creative space, and to make music around the world,” she concluded. 

According to an ELEV8ED press release, KILN extends far beyond music through visual storytelling, guided reflection experiences, community grief release gatherings, and an essay series titled Findings Through Fire. Together, these extensions of the project continue to create space for people to process loss without shame while reminding fans that community is often our greatest source of restoration.

“I learned that there’s no other option in these moments and seasons,” Cooley tells HelloBeautiful. “When it’s hard to get out of bed, you have to work for joy with the same intensity you’d work for a check or your body goal.”

For Cooley, that joy did not arrive overnight.

“I clung to God and asked Him to help me find things to smile about every day,” she says. “He sent friends that fed me. Community that spoke over me. He sent a wonderful Red Cross volunteer, Mrs. Blessing, who was truly a blessing.”

Those small moments of care became the foundation for KILN, a project that encourages people to rethink what grief can look like.

“This project is essentially a thesis that I’m proving out,” Cooley explains. “Grief is sacred and we already have the tools we need to process it.”

Rather than simply writing songs, she designed an entire healing ecosystem that invites listeners to slow down, reflect, release, and reconnect with themselves.

Her own transformation also reshaped how she views work.

After being laid off, Cooley stopped measuring success by corporate milestones and started building a life rooted in creative freedom.

“I built my own work schedule and renamed the days of the week,” she says. “I started hosting Creative Skillshares and Marketing Cohorts. I started a Time Bank community. I stopped impulse applying to jobs and quit updating my LinkedIn. My lifestyle looks liberated right now and I love that after experiencing loss.”

As Black Music Month comes to a close, Cooley believes creating authentic art has become an act of preservation.

“Zora [Neale Hurston] said, ‘If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,’” she says. “It’s important that we document our brilliance. The world is being deprived of what we don’t share.”

Perhaps that is what makes KILN so powerful. It refuses to rush past the hard parts. Instead, it honors them, reminding us that even after the fire, something beautiful can still grow.

King Cooley sheds light on how, across cultures outside of the United States, there are practices that honor the grief experience in the same way life itself is celebrated. 

“From the Oppari rituals of South India to Shiva in Judaism to grief braiding, I’ve been blessed to connect and have a shift around it all,” Cooley shared. “To know that there’s a different way to process this experience and it doesn’t have to be siloed or silent.” 

When asked “why KILN, why now,” King Cooley responded prophetically. 

“Not only are we living in a time where Artificial Intelligence is co-opting our stories, but White supremacy is attempting to compromise and subjugate our existence,” she shared. “Relearning how to live in community is a big part of that [resistance].”

Cooley proclaimed that her album is showing us how we can all process grief together. She says for her, it’s all been a “sweet release” and adds that it might just be the summertime vitamin D, but it’s giving “Cooley’s Good Grief Era.” We love to see it. 

King Cooley’s music has already appeared in Netflix’s Forever and Love Is Blind, BET’s Sistas, CBS’s Beyond the Gates, and she was recently named an official SXSW 2026 performing artist.