For Mahalia, ‘Luvergirl’ is more than a snappy title. It’s a vibe and a spirit. A vibe fostered in the beatific splendour of idyllic island life in Jamaica, shaped by 14 years of life experience working in the music industry and realising that freedom is a beautiful thing. ‘Luvergirl’ is a seven-song EP that encapsulates that sense of freedom and possibility as Mahalia expresses herself in her most primal way: direct, deep and insanely fun.
The last few years, though, have been turbulent for the singer as she navigated slightly choppy professional and personal waters before embarking on that journey to find some creative freedom. “It’s been really weird,” she recalls. “There’s been personal stuff, work stuff, stress. This is my first year where I’ve felt wow, life is kind of living, but at the same time, I’m gearing up to put something out that I’m really proud of. I’m feeling a little bit all over the place, but being neurodivergent and growing up with ADHD and always having a scatterbrain means I’m always all over the place, so I feel like I thrive here. I’m having a good time,” she laughs.
“The process from ‘IRL’ to where I am now is about finding myself”
Two years ago, Mahalia released her second album, ‘IRL’. It was her most expansive and developed collection of songs yet, garnering incredible critical acclaim but not quite scaling the commercial peaks people might have expected. “I look back at ‘IRL’ with only fondness,” she says. “When it came out, I don’t think it was the album that my label necessarily wanted me to make or were expecting me to make. My first album, ‘Love and Compromise’, actually did really well and did a lot for me. I think with ‘IRL’, from a commercial perspective, to them, it didn’t do as well. That tainted it for me for quite a while. It felt like I’d created this beautiful thing, and nobody was that excited about it. In saying that, everybody else was. My friends were, my family loved it. The critical acclaim it received was like, wow. Looking at it now, I still truly believe that I absolutely had to take those three years and make that record. I had to put that time into it and sit with the same people and just lock in.”
The period immediately after ‘IRL’ became the catalyst for the free-spirited ebullience that has become the ‘Luvergirl’ era. “Coming out of ‘IRL’, a lot has changed for me,” she explains. “I made ‘IRL’ with my now ex-partner. We wrote a lot of it together, and we had that journey together. Not that long ago, we broke up, and the process from ‘IRL’ to where I am now is about finding myself.”
“My girlfriends were like, fucking hell, you are a fucking Luvergirl”
To find herself, there was only one place Mahalia could go: the Caribbean island of Jamaica. A country with an incredible musical legacy, and the country where her grandparents left to come to Britain during the Windrush. “I went back to Jamaica,” she says. “I haven’t been to Jamaica since my grandma passed away five years ago. That was really big for me. I really felt like everything locked in at the right moment. Stuff to do with my body, my self-confidence, figuring out different insecurities, and figuring out insecurities around love and men. ‘Luvergirl’ started to come out musically.”
‘Luvergirl’ is a way of life for Mahalia. “I didn’t know what it was and it didn’t have a name, but that whole theme came around because that was my nickname amongst my friends,” she laughs. “I was always in and out of relationships, or at least thinking about them and dating. I was talking about love and falling in and out of love. My girlfriends were like, fucking hell, you are a fucking Luvergirl. It perfectly captures the essence of who I am. That journey has been really fun. I have figured out that I feel really beautiful when I do this, or I feel really sexy when I wear this. Jamaica was so monumental in all of that. It was the root of it all because I felt like I was reconnecting with myself and the version of me that started writing songs and grew up in Leicester surrounded by music. It’s been a really special journey.”
“I just want people to feel like they want to move”
The songs on ‘Luvergirl’ are all dance music in its purest sense. This is music to make you feel, inspired by the reggae and dancehall sounds of the island where she spent so much time crystallising this project. “Every time I’ve met a new producer, they’ve asked, ‘How do you want it to feel?’, and I say, ‘I just want people to feel like they want to move’,” she smiles. “It doesn’t have to be 120 bpm. A song like ‘Pressure Points’ with Lila Iké is slower and sexier, but you still feel like you want to move. That is really how I feel about reggae and dancehall. It doesn’t matter about the speed — if the artist is saying something right, or if the bass or the drum is hitting in the right way, you just want to flow with it.”
Lila Iké is one of a number of featured artists who represent a new wave of Jamaican stars. The EP also has guest spots by Masicka, reggae singer Tanya Stephens, by way of a beautiful sample, and the gloriously unique voice of Bayka. “I was in awe because a lot of these artists I loved, and a lot of them my friends at home haven’t heard of yet,” enthuses Mahalia. “I was so inspired on that trip. Everyone moves a little bit differently in Jamaica. It’s a slower pace, people show up later in the evening, maybe there’s some rum flying around or a bit of weed. It felt like I was hanging out with my mate, and we were just talking and making music. Bayka was really natural. He literally sounds like he’s growling. There’s something about that I found very exciting. I had never heard a voice like that here in the UK.”
“Who gives a fuck about numbers anymore?”
One of the collection’s highlights is the poppy, hypnotic jam ‘Instructions’, one of those beautiful moments when you can audibly hear how much fun the singer is having. It’s a song that encapsulates the spirit of what Mahalia wanted to do, unencumbered by expectation or routine. “I was so sure of what I wanted to say and how I wanted the music to sound and feel,” she says. “I knew what I wanted it to do to other people. With every project, I’m aware of what I want it to do and how I want it to feel, but with this, maybe because I was really self-assured, I could feel that coming out in the music.
“With a song like ‘Instructions’, I was having conversations with my label, and one of the A&Rs said to me, ‘What’s it about?’ It’s just about having a fucking good time. There’s a story in there, and yes, I’m seeing this person, and I want everyone in the room to know that I fancy this person, but really and truly, rock to the left and rock to the right is really just about that. It’s about movement. I feel so confident in my writing and clear on every lyric. I don’t think I’ve ever had that confidence in the studio before this project. I’ve always been the type of artist to second-guess everything. It was really fucking fun.”
The ability to do ‘Luvergirl’ now is something Mahalia puts down to a change in culture and attitude in the music industry in a time of uncertainty and rapid change. “Five years ago, as an artist signed to a major, a major label is obviously a business, so they’re thinking about money and chart success, but that’s changed so much because we don’t know what’s going to do well. Now no one gives a fuck,” she says. “What that means is for an artist like me who’s signed to a major, caring about business and money, it’s given us the reins more to say I want to do this for the art only and not for numbers, because who gives a fuck about numbers anymore. That’s meant that I can now say I’m going in the studio with this kid who hasn’t even put a song out yet, but I heard him sing at a jam night in Kingston and he’s unbelievable and I want to work with him.”
Aside from the people featured on the EP, Mahalia was equally influenced by the breadth of talented artists working in Jamaica. “Jamaica is the biggest island in the Caribbean, but it’s an incredibly small island. There’s all this talent bursting out. It’s so important for artists everywhere to come together and be inspired by each other. The biggest thing for me is just how inspired I felt. That’s why I’ve been going back so much. I want to feel that injection of inspiration. It’s half of who I am. It’s quite a strange thing to grow up as a dual heritage kid here, not really knowing your culture. Especially with me being third gen. It was my grandparents who came during Windrush. I learnt a lot from my mum. To really learn and understand yourself, you have to go. It’s deeply, deeply inspiring.”
“For all my life, Jamaica was my grandma”
The final song on the project is one of the most moving and beautiful pieces Mahalia has ever written. ‘Farewell (Pretty Jamaica)’ is a tender lullaby to the island of her heritage and the island that has given light to a new phase of her life. It features a sample of her grandma’s voice and wonderfully evokes the spirit of a magical place. “It’s so special,” she says proudly. “Having my gorgeous grandma’s voice at the beginning is the best bit. I’ve never written about death and grief in that way. I’ve been quite lucky in my life that I haven’t lost very many people. When my grandma died, I didn’t really know how to talk about it. When ‘Farewell’ came, it was a love letter to her and the island.
“For all of my life, Jamaica was my grandma. I would go and be in her house and sit on the veranda doing hundreds of fucking crosswords with her. Everything that was Jamaica to me was my grandma Pearl. Writing ‘Farewell’ was so cathartic. It was like my own therapy session of really getting that out and what it meant to me. That song wasn’t originally on the project, and when it came to the end, I was like, this has to be on this project. With all the sounds, people and artists, it doesn’t make sense not to have it there. I think it’s a moment where people get to really understand my connection. I’m not just a brown-skinned girl from Leicester who’s decided it’s time to get in touch with my Caribbean roots. There really is a story there.”
The story is one that continues as Mahalia’s ‘Luvergirl’ era is brought to life around the world, from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, England, and everywhere in between. Luvergirls are assembling. “I only really hang out with my girlfriends at the moment. I’m trying to be around a lot of feminine energy. My day-to-day is the girls and the gays,” laughs Mahalia. The rest of the year is filled with plans: furnish the house that she’s just bought, get into painting as it’s a lot cheaper to just make your own than invest in fine art, learn to drive, maybe do some acting, and continue the new musical project that she says she’s accidentally started. Liberated from the grind of record, tour, release, etc., and after 14 years in the game, Mahalia is having fun and is eager to try new things. “I’m figuring out if there are other parts of entertainment I might be good at?” she laughs, as she ponders doing a podcast. But most importantly, above all else, always live that ‘Luvergirl’ life.
Mahalia’s EP ‘Luvergirl’ is out now.
Leave a Reply