New Single: Demae “Ain’t Easy”
8 February 2025
“Iyamah is open, as you can choose who you want to be at any point, any time, any day, you’re not tied down to one thing, you are not restricted”. When digging through to her catalogue, this candid illustration of her artist name rings true. Iyamah’s music seems to serve a greater purpose than just a great listen. It’s about community, transformation and self-enlightenment, all qualities I detect in full effect when sitting down for our chat.
Having just settled down after an extensive UK tour, Iyamah set the jazz and soul lovers of this year’s Cross the Tracks festival alight. In a beautiful showcase of her instinctual bond with music, the Brighton-born songstress took her tour energy straight to the Caboose stage to put on an electrifying, powerful – at points stripped back – and vocally immaculate performance.
Iyamah’s catalogue of celestial, neo soul melodies chronicle her vibrant upbringing in Brighton. She illustrates her colourful environments surrounded by world sounds, dance and the vivacity of the festivals she frequented on weekends, all through her conceptual works. Her vocals dance across jazz-injected production with dustings of reggae, hip hop and latin sounds. “My auntie was a dancer, she would do west african dance. It was very raw and organic with sounds of drumming, lots of rhythm, a heartbeat.” she tells me. Digging as far back to her first releases, Iyamah’s relationship with movement, this heartbeat she describes, is painted in vivid technicolor through her music.
This same love of rhythm, bass and movement saw Iyamah forge a love for dance music from a young age. “I’ve always felt like beats are very important to me, so when I started clubbing, (way under age)” she adds laughing “me and my mates just loved drum and bass. It’s a similar feeling when it comes to community, when you’re listening to drum and bass”. This early pull to the genre led the Brighton songstress to start writing to these heavier, fast-paced productions, leading to releases with veteran producers like Pola & Bryson, Holy Goof and My Nu Leng. Though neo soul and jazz stands strong throughout her own releases, Iyamah pulls together an eclectic mix of influences through her collaborations, from Dance Music to Hip Hop and R&B. “Being a mixed race girl growing up in quite a white area I was drawn to a lot of R&B and soul singers, I felt a connection to that as well.”
From the moment I sat down with Iyamah, I instantly eased into my seat as we laughed about the impromptu nature of our chat and the potential mishaps she might experience with her gorgeous patterned two piece – which of course stayed put during her performance. Iyamah radiates an inescapable lightness, and instantly the radiant qualities of her music come to life. “I feel like they’ve given me such a great tent”, she exclaims, gearing up to her set a few hours from our chat. “We’ve just come off the back of a tour. So me and the band are in the zone right now”. During her performance we saw Iyamah bounce effortlessly off her accomplished band, with moments of calm for her power-house vocals and even a stripped back ukulele solo.
Preceding her recent tour and her set at Cross the Tracks, Iyamah dropped an extended project titled ‘In Two Worlds’, which she co-produced. The production process was a luminary one, she tells me, that challenged her in a way she’s never been challenged before. “It’s all about someone trying to get their dreams,” she begins telling me, “trying to change their reality into what they see in their imagination and all the obstacles that they see along the way”.
Iyamah’s storytelling throughout the project is often conceptual, painting pictures of her inner monologue and childlike daydreams. “It’s tapping into my inner child in a way, this little girl who had such a big dream, but with all these things that I felt were blocking me from being able to get there.”
As she describes, ‘In Two Worlds’ depicts the journey one undertakes to achieve their dreams and pursuit of fulfillment. There’s a beauty in this journey which Iyamah paints in tracks like ‘ladybird’ and ‘ruler’. Yet there’s the risk of getting lost in this pursuit, she reflects, “what if you’re already living your dream, but you can’t see it, because you’re so focussed on trying to get something, that you can’t see what you already have”. These moments of realisation she mentions are seen unraveling as early as the album opening ‘Chasing Dreams’, and the soulful and minimal ‘8 Of Swords’ where she sings ‘sometimes we lose our insight / blindly alive, out of line’.
The process of creating the album took on a similar and lengthy odyssey to the pursuit of ‘dreams’ that Iyamah narrates in ‘In Two Worlds’ – which feels symbolic. Having embarked on a two year process of creating the project, I was keen to ask her about this undertaking. Instantly, she let out a brief laugh, “I think the most incredible thing was releasing it, it was starting to become never-ending. Creativity is very close to insanity, they say it’s a very fine line, and I definitely felt like I was crossing that”. There’s a sense of relief, and then excitement, as her focus shifts on bringing the album to life through performance and “falling back in love” with every track. It’s clear that ‘In Two Worlds’ was an enlightening process, that Iyamah wanted to showcase to the listener, as both a biographical and universal parable, of sorts. “I’ve learned alot from making this project. It’s a special one and it was worth taking the time on it. It’s a journey”.
