Click Image to Download!

ALA.NI was performing the final show in support of her acclaimed debut album, ‘You & I,’ when her vintage 1930’s RCA ribbon microphone finally gave out. The mic had been everywhere with her over the past few years, a constant companion as she toured across four continents and performed everywhere from the NPR Tiny Desk to Lincoln Center. It would have been easy for her to despair in the face of such bad luck, but instead, ALA.NI recognized the moment as something far more profound, a symbol of all she’d accomplished and all that lay ahead.

“I was performing in Japan at the time, and the mic was surrounded by cherry blossoms that the promoter had frozen and saved since the spring,” she explains. “When the mic died, all the engineers stood in a circle and bowed to it like they were saying goodbye. I believe in life cycles and personal evolution, and that experience really felt like a ceremony, a ritual marking the end of one phase and the beginning of the next.”

If ALA.NI’s spectacular sophomore album, ‘ACCA,’ is any indication, her next phase is set to be even more exhilarating than her first. Consisting primarily of dense, harmonically intricate vocal arrangements with sparse or no instrumental backing at all, the collection is at once raw and rich, gritty and elegant, sweet and biting. Iggy Pop and rapper/actor Lakeith Stanfield both make appearances on the album, but make no mistake: ‘ACCA’ is pure ALA.NI. She wrote, produced, and arranged each song herself, layering up hundreds of vocal tracks in order to create an immersive, hypnotic world that blurs the lines between vibrating vocal cords, bowed strings, and blown reeds. Like her debut, the record was written entirely a capella, but this time around, ALA.NI focused her attention on beats and grooves, crafting infectious, rhythmic tunes that owe more to Dr. Dre and legendary reggae artist Errol Dunkley than Billie Holiday and Sarah Vaughan.

“I wanted to incorporate more movement into this album and make songs that I could dance to,” she explains. “I wanted to bring a different kind of energy. I never claimed to be a jazz singer with the last record, so I didn’t feel any pressure to write in the same vein or to stick to some arbitrary definition of musical genre.”

When ALA.NI’s debut came out in 2017, critics were quick to make comparisons to the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Judy Garland, but her music actually reflected a far more complex tapestry of influence and experience. Born in London to Grenadian-immigrant parents, ALA.NI grew up listening to everything from cabaret to calypso. Her great uncle, Leslie “Hutch” Hutchinson, was one of Britain’s most popular singers in the 1920’s and 30’s, and her father played bass in a reggae band. She loved Julie Andrews and the ballet, but was told that as a young black girl, those things weren’t meant for her. After graduating from London’s prestigious Sylvia Young Theatre School, ALA.NI found work as a backup vocalist, performing across a broad range of genres with artists as diverse as Mary J Blige, Andrea Bocelli, Damon Albarn, and John Legend. 

The bold sound of ‘You & I’ incorporated elements from the myriad worlds ALA.NI traversed, and the response to the record was nothing short of rapturous on both sides of the Atlantic. NPR’s Bob Boilen raved that “you won't hear another record that sounds like this one this year, or dare I say this decade,” while Essence called the music “simple, sweet, and elegant,” and Fader dubbed it “majestic.” In the UK, The Guardian described ALA.NI as “a beguiling singer capable of torching lazy assumptions,” and The Standard gushed that “to hear [her] sing in her hushed, bluesy voice…is to feel mesmerised, spirited away.” She enthralled festival crowds around the world, turned heads with her television debut on Later…with Jools Holland, made a fan of David Byrne, shared bills with everyone from Rufus Wainwright to the Dance Theater of Harlem, and performed a showcase at David Lynch’s Silencio in Paris, the city she now calls home.

When it came time to record her follow-up, ALA.NI initially envisioned the album as a completely a capella project, and indeed, the finished product is made up almost entirely of human voices (beatboxing serves as percussion, for instance, and she lowered her own vocals with an octavizer on several tracks to create the illusion of bass). A few months into the recording process, though, the concept began to evolve, and ALA.NI started toying with the idea of working backwards in order to flesh out the tunes with subtle instrumental layers. At times haunting, at times ecstatic, the result is as unusual as it enchanting, without a single guitar or piano in sight

“It was all pretty lo-fi and scrappy on my end,” says ALA.NI, who often captured the initial kernels of songs spontaneously on her iPad or laptop as she traveled. “I didn’t record to a click, I didn’t use a tuner; I’d just press record and lay down whatever came out.”

She likens the process to cooking: add a little low end here, sprinkle some high end there, and keep experimenting until the flavors are just right. In some cases, that meant calling in a string quartet or bass clarinetist or an accordion player. In other cases, it meant calling in Iggy Pop to recite some French poetry.

“I knew Iggy was a fan because he’d played a lot of songs from my first album on his BBC show,” she explains. “I decided to be brave and ask him if he’d indulge me in my art, and he said yes, so I found a poet in France who could help me turn this story I had in my head into a piece called ‘Le Diplomate.’ After we recorded it, Iggy and I went to the beach for a nice swim and a long chat. I’d spent so much time alone working on the album that having a legend like him step in and agree to be a part of it really gave me a lot of belief in what I was doing.”

While the actor and rapper Lakeith Stanfield also contributes to a track on the album (Stanfield remixed “Cherry Blossom” from ALA.NI’s debut back in 2017, as well), ‘ACCA’ is ultimately a raw and powerful vision of modern womanhood, one that eschews antiquated notions of femininity in favor of an unapologetically honest and emotional account of pain, anger, sadness, and growth. A broken-hearted lover finally says all the things she kept inside on the breezy “Sha La La,” while hesitancy gives way to confidence as the narrator walks out on an abusive partner in the doo-wop-inspired “Hide,” and emotional baggage is worn like a badge of honor on the tongue-in-cheek “Papa.” “I can do it in the nice way / or I can be a bitch,” ALA.NI announces later in the album, leaving it up the listener to decide which is which.

Many of the songs began life as poems, which offered ALA.NI freedom from the traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus construction of modern pop. The tunes often twist and turn in unexpected ways, sometimes stopping to grapple with a particularly thorny revelation on their roundabout path to higher understanding. ALA.NI frequently puts herself in the shoes of others when she writes, relying on a mixture of imagination and empathy to see the world through different eyes, but she never loses sight of her own sense of self in the process. The result is a departure from her debut that feels perfectly natural in its evolution, a bold next step from an artist who remains singularly focused on pushing herself to new heights for no other motive than the sheer joy of creation itself.

“I wrote and produced and funded this record on my own,” ALA.NI concludes, “so it’s a pure reflection of who I am. The songs express what I want to express and make me move the way I want to move, and at the end of the day, that’s what matters most.”