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Thirst Aid Kit is back!
Nichole Perkins and Bim Adewumnmi are taking their lusty podcast to Slate, where the hosts promise “to do something a little different from what we were doing before.”
Thirst Aid Kit, which previously called BuzzFeed home, goes beyond celebrity crushes by blending pop culture and sexual desire to create a space for listeners to explore the things and people that drive our lust. There’s original fan fiction and hilarious interviews wrapped up with Adewunmi and Perkins’s warmth and banter.
“Slate came to us knowledgeable about the podcast,” Perkins said of the podcast’s move. “They were already avid listeners so they knew what we were trying to do and what we wanted to get across with our overall mission of the podcast.”
Adewunmi adds, “What sealed it for me was this thing that there was never a question, at least at the beginning, of ‘So, what is Thirst Aid Kit?’ [It was] quite reassuring to understand that they know exactly what we do and they seemed interested in helping us continue to do it while growing the audience and trying to get it to more people.”
Both Perkins and Adewunmi hope to grow Thirst Aid Kit‘s audience with the new move. Slate currently has more than 25 podcasts in production and last year the company earned more than 180 million downloads across its roster of audio offerings.
Gabriel Roth, Slate’s Editorial Director of Audio, told ESSENCE, “Thirst Aid Kit is one of my favorite podcasts—sharp, hilarious, companionable, and endlessly insightful on celebrity, sexuality, and lust. I’m thrilled there will be more episodes, and even more thrilled that they’ll be coming from Slate.”
Thirst Aid Kit‘s loyal fanbase—or thirst buckets as they’re lovingly called—will undoubtedly make the move with Adewunmi and Perkins, a thought that both find “genuinely humbling.”
“We started out just Nichole and I having a blast in the studio,” Adewunmi said. “We just really enjoyed making it. To find that people not only appreciated what we were trying to do but [that they] were fans is humbling.”
“And Nichole really is our correspondence person in terms of the emails. The emails she and our producer TK [Keisha “TK” Dutes] would get from the Thirst Aid Kit inbox were just like…this wasn’t shallow listening. People were telling us about themselves and about their lives. They were telling us about the stuff you think, ‘God that is intimate.’ And I think that was when I began to understand that this was 45 minutes to an hour every week that resonated so much further, so much deeper than that would suggest.”
Perkins adds, “It has been kind of humbling and kind of surprising because, obviously, we hope to reach people and give them a different way of looking at the way we think and talk about desire and pop culture and the way we examine our crushes, our harmless celebrity crushes.”
She continues: “But to get those emails from people who are sexual assault survivors who have been wrestling with the idea of finding men attractive again, to get emails from our queer listeners, particularly women who love and date other women, it’s just been really overwhelming and surprising and it feels good. It feels good to know people are engaging in the work in a very meaningful way.”
Thirst Aid Kit returns Thursday, September 26.