It’s a special sort of artist who can rope in one of the main men in UK jazz on a track that sounds like prog-metallers Tool and is about periods, but Alewya is a force to be reckoned with. That song is The Code, featuring jazz drummer extraordinaire Moses Boyd, in which Alewya’s frustration about a heavy flow became a meditation on her Ethiopian-Egyptian ancestry. She delivers her refined yet ravey dance-pop with the attitude of Aaliyah, the cool of a be-shaded Neo from The Matrix and a whole lot of “twisted Firestartaaaar” energy.
The past year has been impossibly tough for breaking artists, but Alewya (pronounced “Ah-le-wee-ya”) has been gradually building buzz with her ancestral club bangers. There was Jagna, which made it on to Annie Mac’s Radio 1 show this year; Sweating, a shadowy, sultry track, drawing on dancehall and reggaeton rhythms and trap’s haunted instrumentals; and Alewya’s latest single Spirit_X, on which she raps over a classy drum’n’bass beat.
Alewya, 26, was born in Saudi Arabia, and her family moved to west London as refugees when she was five. You can hear the Middle Eastern influences, she has said, in her style of singing and how she plays Arabic scales on her guitar. She sounds like little else at the moment, her spiky delivery puncturing anything from jumpy percussive house to nu-metal. And she’s not just a singer but also a sculptor and illustrator – a “triple threat”, as the fashion magazine Love put it). Alewya’s closest spiritual cousin, however, could be her friend Little Simz, on whose recent EP she featured and whom she’ll support on tour in December. Both are artists who transcend styles; both are twisting UK music into bold new shapes.
Alewya plays All Points East on 28 August
