music one to watch
Deyah
This rapper and producer from Cardiff has developed into one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Welsh music. After Deyah’s glowingly-received 2020 album, Care City, she returns with Black Glamour, a mixtape full of beauty, ferocity and fire. Emma Way quizzed her about it.
What do you want people to take from Black Glamour? I think it’s a reminder that we’re all on some kind of journey, that we all have stuff that we’re dealing with, but that there’s redemption at the end of the journey if we allow it to take place.
I saw you support Little Simz in April, at the BBC 6 Music festival. How far were you into writing Black Glamour at that time? I’d finished writing it two days before that – but then went away for three weeks or so, and when I came back my manager called me and said he thought there needed to be more tracks. So I ended up spending most of May, June and July writing extra tracks and adding them on there. All the interludes are the ones I wrote after the festival.
Speaking of the interludes, they all have the words ‘her’ in their title. What do they bring to the release? So as well as ‘her’, they’ve got the elements: fire, air, earth and water. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling recently, and ended up in really ex- treme weather conditions. Just being in those climates and environments made me realise the power of elements: the anger of a storm; the calm- ness of the water… but the water can get choppy. Then I started to look at what it means to be a woman, even just down to the stereotypical things of mood swings and what we go through on a monthly basis. I tried to connect the power of women and the ups and downs in nature.
Did you also try to bring these themes into the production? I hear quite a lot of dark moments and almost metallic textures.
The idea, before the lyrics, was that when we had the element, we wrote the element down. And then I would create something based on the el- ement and then right afterwards, so the instrumental or the beat came first. I think in (fiyHER) there’s an African kind of vibe – it reminded me of my family in Nigeria dancing around fire.
In Into The Wild, you reference being amongst a bunch of animals – a reference to the music industry? The deeper I got into the industry, the more I realised how savage it is. When you’re younger or more naïve, you don’t get too involved with the business side, and then as you get closer, it’s like – is this really what goes on? So that was definitely the link.
What was the biggest difference you’ve seen between Care City and Black Glamour? Care City was more widely accepted by the audience, but less accepted by the industry; Black Glamour has been less accepted by the audience, but more accepted by the industry. When I released Care City, it was a very personal thing, but I knew industry-wise it wasn’t anything that would move. It would just be another project that had a conscious rap- per rapping on lo-fi beats. Whereas with Black Glamour, it’s extremely dark – I couldn’t see people sitting down and taking it in – but on a busi- ness level, it’s opened up crazy doors in terms of sync deals, film deals, and labels looking at me.
So have you been writing since then? What have you found you’re moving towards now?
I started writing this at the end of last year – back then I was in and out of hospital with overdoses and rehab. I was in such a dark place. It was horrible. Since then, I’ve gotten married and become more settled. I never thought I’d be a settled person. I really thought I’d be a 60-year- old in Las Vegas still doing drugs! I think, moving forward, the music is going to have an element of joy. I couldn’t say any of my songs in the past have had much joy.
Black Glamour is out now. Info:
linktr.ee/deyahofficial
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