“Zero,” an impressive debut album, confirms all the talents of an artist capable of containing multiple emotions within a single, sweeping surge of creativity.
It took Alewya nearly five years to finally release her first album. Not that she was idle: in the early 2020s, she appeared collaborating with a handful of mavericks from the London scene (Little Simz, Moses Boyd), did modeling, revealed her drawings, and asserted her status as a singer-producer during a debut EP that linked London to the Caribbean (Panther in Mode).
Like Wesley Joseph, who also released his first long-format project this year, Alewya has chosen to take her time. And for good reason, as these fifteen new tracks seek less to hastily answer a growing hype than to embrace the multiple facets and obsessions of an artist with broad ideas.
Spirituality, Groove, and Heritages
Evidence of this can be found in Boom Ka Ka: the kind of explosive hit that, in barely three minutes, brushes with spirituality, reworks the chorus from Nas and Lauryn Hill’s If I Ruled the World (Imagine That) — her idol —, deploys a house groove and demonstrates a true mastery of percussion, undeniably owed to her North and East African roots.
But all these rhythms inherited from the soundsystems (Selah) or these powerful beats (Guttah) pale before the album’s real treasure: Alewya’s voice, extraordinarily powerful, heir to a thousand traditions, which in the same track moves from dancehall to R&B, from soul to rap, and says far more about British Black identity than any political discourse.
Zero (LDN Records/Because). Release on June 26.
