By Savannah Brown
When Krista Kroiss, the lead guitarist of the Eugene-based band Mothra (and KWVA's former DJ Kryptonite), arrives at Monster House – a popular house show venue – she’s 36 minutes late. Granted, she looks like a rockstar; her hair and makeup are perfect, and she’s wearing a flannel and very ripped jeans. Clearly, she’s done this before. But as she’s leaning against a pool table talking to me, it’s clear that it’s the closest thing she’s done to sitting all day, and the protein bar she’s eating is her dinner (aside from a muffin she had earlier in the day, it’s also her first meal). She cuts our interview short so she can grab her guitar cables because she left them at home. Watching Kroiss run around like this, I relate to her so much. As a young person, it’s difficult to keep up with the world when it feels like it’s always spinning so far ahead of you. Except I don’t have a musical bone in my body, and Kroiss is full of them.
Before Kroiss, 22, joined Mothra, she was a college sophomore at an all-time mental health low. After a full-fledged identity crisis, Kroiss went on a journey of self-rediscovery as she learned where music fit into her life, and who she is outside of the art she creates. As a college graduate, she is now going down multiple avenues. She is a musician, regularly playing for a myriad of venues around the Pacific Northwest, including half a dozen WOW Hall shows and headlining the Oregon Country Fair in 2023. She’s about to go on their first tour and release their first single, “Don’t Touch Me.” She is also a journalist, who’s worked a prestigious internship, has had a story picked up by Oregon Public Broadcasting, and is starting her career as a full-time reporter. Through her struggles, Kroiss realized that she does not need to define herself with just one label, and has developed comfort within herself to succeed in whoever she wants to be.
When I see Kroiss again, it’s to see her perform. She describes herself as a “shredder,” and that’s exactly what she is. When Mothra hit the stage, the audience went crazy. As relatably scrambled as Kroiss is off the stage, she translates this perfectly to a magnetic, wild, facemelter that blends perfectly with the rest of the indie rock band. When she solos for “Don’t Touch Me,” the crowd moshes hard. Whether she’s laying out a head-banging-neck-breaking solo, or taking a back seat to sadly strum along to soft vocals, Kroiss knows exactly how to adjust her playing to reflect whatever type of angst the respective song calls for. It’s so natural watching her emulate indie moodiness, that it’s hard to believe she wasn’t born with a guitar in her hand. Though, she practically was.
Kroiss picked up a guitar for the first time at 6 years old in an after-school guitar class and hasn’t put it down since. “My parents just said ‘Hey, this looks like a cool extracurricular, are you interested?’...and I just never stopped,” Kroiss said. In junior high, she joined an independent music school, taking advanced guitar lessons and gaining genuine guitar and band experience before she was even a teenager. Kroiss then joined School of Rock – a nationwide music school – where she toured in a band and further utilized her skills. Kroiss was always busy with School of Rock. She said, “Sometimes I did two performance programs at the same time, especially at the beginning…they didn’t have a lot of guitar players who were experienced, so I was one of the better ones at the school.” Kroiss said that when her biggest competition (two 10-year-old prodigies) moved away, “I became top dog.”
By her senior year, Kroiss’ extra-curricular life was dedicated to playing. She participated in so many music-related activities, including her own garage band called “The Mildreds,” that she garnered a reputation in her community as a rockstar. With all of her involvement, comfortability, and the attention she was receiving, it was easy for Kroiss to completely define herself as a musician. “When I thought of myself I thought: guitar player. I didn’t have much else…I kind of made my rock guitar my entire identity.”
It was how she dressed, how she acted, and who she saw herself being forever. “And I was okay with that,” she said.
Kroiss emphasized music has always meant more to her than just an after-school hobby. “Playing guitar was my release. It was the way I felt my emotions and coped with any stresses I had.”
Kroiss chose the University of Oregon for its niche Popular Music Studies major, hoping to open a music business.
When she came to college as a freshman in the fall of 2019, she decided to postpone directly involving herself in the Eugene music scene. She still wrote and played music in private, but, feeling exhausted after her especially musically-active senior year, she took a short break from performing.
By winter term, Kroiss performed in an ensemble for her major and played music for an on-campus theater production. Though she was starting to involve herself in music again, she said “It didn’t feel the same as being in my own band.” Kroiss began to crave the community and teamwork of performing in a group, and was ready to set out and find some people to rock with.
However, it would take far longer than anticipated for this goal to come to fruition.
In the spring term of 2020, all of her plans came to a screeching halt with the global middle finger we all knew too well: COVID-19. “My mental health was already teetering,” Kroiss said, “But this destroyed me.” For the vast majority of Kroiss’ life, music defined her.
She talked about how in high school she had a strong support system for her artistic passion, and losing them when she went to college was difficult in its own right. But she said that losing everyone with COVID-19 truly substantiated these issues. “I [didn’t] have any of these things that made me feel confident and grounded.”
With no outlet to perform, she didn’t know who she was. “I had this hole where my sense of self was supposed to be,” Kroiss said. She had immense struggles with anxiety, depression, and desperately clinging on to the few relationships she was able to keep through COVID-19. She started seeing a therapist, which she gives the most credit to for her healing process. Yet, she never lost her creative hunger.
A year went by, and Kroiss found what she had been looking for. Belle Neininger, the lead singer of what would become Mothra, put out an ad on Instagram looking for a guitarist to start a band. “I made it a goal to at least try to find more women or like-minded people to play with…Krista is capable of writing relevant riffs for my songs that complement the melody of my voice. She can play like a wizard whenever she wants.” Neininger said. Kroiss responded and the two started playing together semi-frequently.
However, Kroiss was still in a mental health slump. Mothra had yet to be fully established, so Kroiss and Neininger were only meeting up for occasional jam sessions. She said that while playing music again helped her, she was still in a rough place. Because COVID prevented her from playing for so long, her motivation started waning, and she was no longer revolving her life around musicianship. “I was losing my passion for the thing that I had wrapped my entire identity around. I didn’t know what to do. I felt really lost.”
Looking for a different path, in June of 2021, Kroiss joined the Daily Emerald, which is the student-run campus newspaper. She enjoyed being the music editor for her high school’s paper, so she decided to try her hand at writing. “I knew I didn’t want to be a musical artist and my business classes bored the crap out of me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I started looking at journalism.”
It wasn’t the only reason she started writing though. In the summer of 2021, Kroiss was desperate for a change of pace. “I joined The [Daily] Emerald right as we were coming out of COVID,” Kroiss said. “I was feeling really isolated and I wanted to reconnect with human beings again.” However, what began as a creative outlet and a side project, soon became much more. “As I kept going down the journalism path, I realized this is what I want to do.” Kroiss found she had a knack for it, writing three cover stories her first year. By her junior year in 2022, she became an editor. “I didn’t feel like I had to make myself want to try it.”
Also around this time, Mothra found its full lineup and she was starting to play everywhere. She said that the “external motivator to play” reinvigorated her interest, and harnessing her creativity through guitar helped her fall in love with music again. However, this looked a lot different than it had previously. “I was in the band, and we played on the scene, but I was never someone who did more than that.”
Though she found a different avenue, she was still feeling conflicted. “I was really struggling with where music fit into my life because it wasn’t the same place as it was in high school,” Kroiss said. “I felt the need to wrap myself around one thing. I am a journalist and that is all I am, or I am a musician and that is all I am.” With a lot of support, therapy, and self-discovery, Kroiss learned that her identity does not have to be confined to one thing. She finally realized, “I am a more complicated person than that.”
“I am more than just music…[Journalism] was where I started learning that,” Kroiss said. “Music is important to me, but not everything to me.”
When Kroiss talks about her music career, I notice that it grows when she does, and there’s this constant parallel between her personal life and her music life. Music is very clearly a very important part of who she is, but it evolves alongside her. When she entered the scene again, she was completely reinvented, both as a person and as a musician.
In 2022, She interned for the Eugene Weekly newspaper, and made an appearance on Oregon Public Broadcasting when they covered one of her pieces. Kroiss noticed that house shows had been getting shut down more than ever, so she wrote an in-depth piece on the legal and historical perspectives of why it was happening. When it got published in February of 2023, Kroiss “got an email from OPB saying they wanted to pick up my story...I was like ‘This is fake. Is this real?”
In 2023, she was a recipient of the prestigious Edward Snowden Internship, which stationed her at an Eastern Oregon publication as a full-time reporter. As proud as Kroiss clearly is with all she’s achieved in music, she said “That feeling I had [receiving the internship] was the most accomplished I had ever felt in my life.”
Kroiss is now a college graduate, who proudly lives the dual identity of being a journalist and a musician — while leaving room for whoever else she wants to be.
Last month, I watched Kroiss perform at WOW Hall for her 6th time. She was dressed in a lovely green floor-length gown with her golden hair pulled up. There was something visually endearing about watching someone who looked like a princess get a crowd to mosh. Kroiss told me that one of her turning points in music was when she wrote the solo for the Mothra song “Debasing,” because it reopened her creative floodgates. When Kroiss played it that night, it was electrifying. Even though she’s played the song probably hundreds of times, she plays it like it’s the first time she’s bringing it into the world.
In another music-life parallel, the next morning, she moved to Wilsonville, Oregon having taken her first job as a full-time reporter. She is also moving on to the next chapter of Mothra, going on tour and putting the final touches on their latest album.
I asked Kroiss how she was feeling about these two major transitions happening simultaneously. “All of the feelings. I’m nervous, I’m excited,” she said. “I feel like I’m starting to become an adult now, which has all kinds of terror..but also I’m excited to get my career going and I also have my band and my boyfriend. Things are going really well.”
After the show, Kroiss said she knew she messed up some, but it didn’t matter. As a guitar player, Kroiss said that perfection is not her goal. “It’s my personal, non-scientific belief that professional musicians don’t always play perfectly. They just know how to hide their mistakes,” she said. Kroiss’ priority is simple: she wants to “give people the feels.” Through the relationships she makes, the music she creates, and the stories she tells — that’s exactly what she does.