LAS VEGAS — With a potential end to her music career dead ahead, K.Flay had a choice to make: Take it over the cliff or swerve hard and give it another go. The Illinois-born, Bay-Area-educated and L.A.-based artist had lost the hearing in her right ear last fall and now knew it was never coming back.

“It gave me an out for music,” she said, recalling her manager’s words: “‘If you want to quit and go back to school and get a graduate degree … this would be an appropriate time.’ There’s a little bit of a line in the sand. It forced me to choose to make music again—the way that you do when you’re starting out. It’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I want to do this. … I need to make this next body of work, and I need to do it now.’”

K.Flay swerved hard and got to work.

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“If you would have asked me four months ago if I would be playing tonight, I would have said I’m not ready,” Kristine Flaherty tells a packed Hard Rock Café on the Vegas Strip in late April. This music showcase called The Gathering is her first show since it all went sideways last September. She explains what happened as fans scream, “I love you!” back at her.

Last fall, she’d just gotten back from Tanzania, East Africa, where she’d climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro.

“I was in peak physical, mental shape and getting ready to go on tour,” K.Flay said. Then one day she woke up without any hearing in her right ear. That was accompanied by intense vertigo, making her severely ill. She went to an emergency room and was soon diagnosed with sudden sensorineural hearing loss. The condition was completely unrelated to her exposure to loud music as an artist. It affects 4,000 new people each year, most commonly between 30 and 60 years old. K.Flay is 37.

Besides the physical discomfort, K.Flay couldn’t listen to music at first.

“It hurt me in my heart,” she said. “You know when you just put on a song, and it feels good? It didn’t feel like that. I don’t hear in my right ear, but I have really bad tinnitus constantly. As my brain was getting adjusted to this, if I was getting inundated with sound, it was like my brain was scrambling. It just felt totally overwhelming. It didn’t feel easy and joyful.”

She’s been trying to get that feeling back since then, and she said she’s getting closer. That began when she made up her mind to swerve and get back to work rather than take her music career off the cliff. She got to work before she could change her mind. Now’s she got a new album almost done and a spring and summer tour, preceded by new single “Raw Raw,” which she played live for the first time in Las Vegas.

She said she felt compelled to make music again, and she hopes the immediacy and urgency of the song about forcing herself to open up again translates to listeners. The song actually precedes her partial deafness. It was originally about opening up romantically for the first time following a breakup (she was in a three-year relationship that ended in 2021). Following the break-up single, she’s spent the majority of a year focusing on herself.

“Opening up myself to somebody new … is such a pain in the ass. It’s like, ‘Oh, my God, I’ve got to be open again? What if I get hurt again?’” she said. “Vulnerability, at least in me, feels gruesome, a little bit, emotionally.”

Her hearing loss forced K.Flay to think of openness and rawness in other ways. Everywhere she went, she felt raw and vulnerable. Places that were comfortable before, like a crowded room, a bar or a party, were now extremely disorienting. She was a social butterfly, and she couldn’t be one anymore. She said the change was difficult to deal with.

“I can’t locate sound anymore, so when I’m in environments with tons of noise, it’s scary,” she said. “It’s overwhelming, and it’s kind of upsetting. … It was from that place of vulnerability that the song really came to life and took on a gravity and a heaviness that I had been searching for.”

The sinister-sounding song with the skittering beat and siren-like guitar lines is the first taste of her new album, which she described as heavy-sounding, both thematically and sonically. She said to expect a dense rock sound that’s guitar-forward, which she’s excited about.

The new album will include “Shy,” a bass-laden garage rocker that she also premiered in Las Vegas, which she explained to attendees as being about having to balance her outgoing personality with her Midwestern upbringing, where she wasn’t supposed to raise a stink.

K.Flay said she worked with a couple of her regular collaborators on the album, but a lot of new ones as well, which might be surprising considering her hearing loss. But she said she still has a strong grasp on the songs.

“The body of work that’s on the way is basically the best possible thing I was capable of making,” she said.

Though K.Flay doesn’t believe in one, she said she views the hearing loss as a challenge or dare from a higher power to slow down, accept her situation and move forward with herself changed. She called the experience “strengthening,” and the album reflects this.

“In many ways, it’s me reckoning with this experience, but in a lot of ways it’s this larger reckoning of ‘how do I sit still with myself and not thrash and not get drunk and not zone out on television or whatever I’m going to do to get away from this moment?’” she said.

She said she’s found acceptance. She doesn’t hope her hearing will return; in fact, for some people, it continues to get worse over time. Learning to live with it was the only option. She’s met people since then who’ve been unwilling to accept “the finality of my situation.” It’s important to try all medical options available, she acknowledged, but acceptance is the ultimate goal.

“Sometimes bad things happen, and it doesn’t matter how many specialists you see; it’s just the way it is,” she said.

To that end, the next album is shaping up to be a much more mature album than her prior work, with songs likely to get the attention of an older audience that relates to medical scares as much as breakups or insecurity. But K.Flay is ready to again connect with anyone who’ll listen.

“I hope that the themes running through it transcend time of life or feel connected to lots of different places in life,” she said. “A lot of what I’ve been thinking about creatively is these moments of change and disruption, and what does that feel like; what does that sound like?”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.