anaiis

In a 1994 copy of Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, famed educator, author, theorist and activist bell hooks wrote: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.” Her words speak to an innate sense of wonder, how truth is all too often stranger than fiction. While hook inks the meaning of art, French-Senegalese artist anaiis (whose name is in lowercase as tribute to hooks) translates that ethos into sound.

On her forthcoming album Devotion & The Black Divine, the songs swell with emotional clarity and a growing sense of homecoming. Not to a place, but to the self. anaiis seems to be in conversation with the reverence of nature, recognising our own divinity, and therefore our wholeness in both chaos and beauty. She crafts a body of work that gently pushes herself (lovingly, as you’ll come to learn by listening through) to the edges of her comfort zone.

New motherhood has been a core influence across the project. It deepened anaiis’ understanding of how to react with grace, create with freedom, and captures the reality of being human, unposed and unpredictable. That internal expansion is audible across the record. It leans into the idea that selfhood is something in motion; much like Octavia Butler’s reminder that “God is Change. Everything you touch you change, everything you change, changes you.” Like a tree shaped by its environment, growth isn’t always linear – there are knots and bends formed as it adapts to shifting climates. anaiis toys with this idea that the very nature of existence is to move fearlessly through what is unknowable. That search for freedom, in sound and in spirit, runs through every note.

Where previous work offered catharsis and rupture, Devotion & The Black Divine draws strength from slowness and softness. It opens with “Something is Broken,” a track that lays past pain to rest and clears the ground for something more rooted to take shape. The album signals a deeper commitment to intuition and marks an ongoing transition that began during her time in Brazil, when a collaborative mini-album, anaiis & Grupo Cosmo, was created through live improvisation in just a week, with her newborn son in tow – marking a pivotal expansion in sound and approach.

A string of recent releases have acted as prelude to this new chapter: a reimagining of Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” performed at Chaka Khan’s Meltdown Festival, and two remixes of “B.P.E. (Black People Everywhere)” – a standout from the Brazil sessions – by Sango and Hagan, playlisted on BBC Radio 6 Music. Each release adds dimension to the whole, tracing a lineage of diasporic collaboration and cross-cultural kinship.

Born in Toulouse, raised between Dublin, Dakar, Oakland, and now rooted in London, anaiis' footholds have shaped a perspective founded in movement, flux, community and personal transformation. After her debut single “Nina” in 2018, anaiis released this is no longer a dream in 2021, featuring Chronixx, Sjava