TRACK REVIEW: Laura Mvula - Got Me — Music Musings & Such

TRACK REVIEW:

Laura Mvula

Got Me

9.4/10

The track, Got Me, is available from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gD7LMNCLbwA

GENRES:

R&B/Soul/Pop

ORIGIN:

Birmingham, U.K.

RELEASE DATE:

12th May, 2021

The album, Pink Noise, is available from 2nd July. Pre-order here:

https://atlanti.lnk.to/Pink-Noise

LABEL:

Atlantic

PRODUCERS:

Laura Mvula/Dan Hume

TRACKLIST:

Safe Passage

Conditional

Church Girl

Remedy

Magical

Pink Noise

Golden Ashes

What Matters

Got Me

Before the Dawn

__________

I am not sure why…

I have not reviewed Laura Mvula before. She is one of my favourite artists. With her album, Pink Noise, out on 2nd July, it is the perfect opportunity now! I am going to get to reviewing the latest track, Got Me, in a bit. There are a number of things that I need to explore and discuss before working up to that. Like I do with these reviews, I will sort of start as far back as I can go and then work my way forward. To start, I want to bring in this 2016 interview from The Guardian. In it, we discover details about Mvula’s earlier life and the importance of the Conservatoire:

“I grew up in a very Christian household,” she begins. “The family unit was… tight. Our socialisation, mine and my siblings, was centred on family, church life, school.” It was “a house of love. But if I was to be critical, I would say that there was a lot of growing-up I wasn’t exposed to.” When she went to sixth form college in Solihull, aged 16, “it was the first time I took a bus”. She says that she enrolled at the Conservatoire, aged 18, with the chief intent of finding a musician to marry.

That can’t have been the reason.

“It was. I wanted a saxophonist.” Mvula shrugs: she was a child of the 90s, sax was cool. Her point, anyway, is that “I was sheltered. Massively sheltered.”

At the Conservatoire she met someone right away. “Themba. Just a stunning human being to look at. He had such presence.” She spotted him while they were singing in the same choir. “I literally said to myself, ‘Yes, thanks!’ Even without speaking to him.” They became friends, then a couple. “We had a lot in common. Fathers in the church. Two siblings. I felt a very instant connection. I wanted to spend all of my time with him – I did spend all of my time with him. Not a lot of studying in those years”.

Let’s track back to 2103, as it was then she released the extraordinary debut album, Sing to the Moon. There are many things that impress me about the album. The songwriting and arrangements are so strong and original. I listen to the album now and it does not ever sound dated or lacking in dynamic pull. Mvula’s voice is what grabs me most. It is strong and soulful, though it also has a certain vulnerability and tenderness. In this interview with FADER, we learn more about Mvula’s voice and why her music features, perhaps, unorthodox sounds – a palette that is unique to her:

“Mvula has a brilliant voice. It sounds effortlessly velvety, especially when she layers it on top of itself, something she learned to do when arranging for her aunt’s a cappella quintet, Black Voices. She continued working with the group until she graduated and was forced to earn a living. To stay close to music, she got a job as a receptionist at the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, which was its own form of torture because the music was “literally all happening behind” her desk. Without the structure of school or Black Voices, she forced herself to use her free time to write. She formed a “neo soul jazz experiment” group that disbanded, and then took up GarageBand at home, recording the songs that would eventually appear on her debut EP, She, released late last year, and her first full-length, Sing to the Moon, which came out this March. “The songs that are on the EP and on my album come out of that time of profound frustration, because the job was one to six o’clock in the afternoon, so in the mornings I would be as proactive as possible, and I started doing these song sketches,” she says. “You know, using my laptop and a USB mic and a little MIDI keyboard, which at this point strangely felt like I had real space and real freedom just to do me.” The songs, which eventually led to a deal with RCA, are ebullient and classy takes on modern R&B.

Many of Mvula’s creations feature bells, harp and timpani, a serendipitous aesthetic born out of the fact that she found those built-in samples in GarageBand to be the most workable in the sound bank. “I was just trying to make the best of what was available to me,” she says. For the final versions, she made her way to a studio, upgrading from Apple’s stock sounds to the real thing. The orchestral bombast gives Mvula’s songs a brilliance that sounds straight out of old Hollywood. While her voice is clearly the star, her ability to envision such lush arrangements is what makes her songs so striking. It’s unusual when a newcomer has not just a totality of vision, but the talent to see it through”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hollyoak for Interview Magazine

That debut, Sing to the Moon, announced Laura Mvula as a name to watch and cherish. The album is a remarkable debut. It is not necessarily commercial; the kind of songs one would normally hear on the radio. I think this is a good thing. That said, we find out in this interview from The Independent of 2016, Mvula felt apologetic because the songs were not necessarily ‘radio-friendly’:

“The success of Sing to the Moon took Mvula, who grew up in Birmingham and was classically-trained at the conservatoire, by surprise. “I hadn’t really needed to think about things like ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Am I happy?’ before,” she says. “It all happened so fast that there wasn’t really time for me to look at the art and feel anything.” For Mvula, 2013 was a time of wearing off-white clothing and smiling a lot out of fear of coming across too menacing. “I felt strangely apologetic for the kind of music I was making because it wasn’t radio music, but I wouldn’t express any of that in that context because I was trying to get people to be okay with me existing,” she says. Soon, she found herself looking inwards and questioning what she found: “It was important for me to break out and be comfortable with being uncomfortable, which is kind of what my little life has been like until this point”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Emma Hardy for FADER

I want to move things ahead one album to 2016’s The Dreaming Room. I think that many albums work up to a pretty epic final track. When I think of standout tracks, most of them are near the top of the running order. In the case of The Dreaming Room, one can argue the most special and potent track arrived at the end: Phenomenal Woman. This is a song that has huge personal significance to Mvula. Coming back to that interview from The Independent, we get an understand as to why this song is so meaningful and powerful:

“Mvula finally reached a point of metaphorical bladder relief with “Phenomenal Woman”, the fierce new song based on Maya Angelou’s uplifting poem of the same name that she unleashed on fans earlier this month. It was Angelou’s voice that helped free her from the shackles of “striving to be this f**king woman who was acceptable to everyone”, both in music and her personal life. “I was fed up of feeling that I didn’t have any sense of who I am without that, or that person,” she says. “He, or the music, can’t be my validation for existence, surely, because they change. I can’t rely on them.” Something about hearing Angelou reciting her famous poem of triumphant self-acceptance and confidence lifted her. “I had some kind of epiphany as soon as I heard that slow voice, that depth” she says, closing her eyes as if in a trance. “I was about to go into the shower and I was stood looking at myself in the mirror. It was a different kind of looking in the mirror. It was ‘This is She, outwards, inwardly’. Staring at myself and seeing everyone else as I look at myself.” Before long, “Phenomenal Woman” became her personal anthem, a musical protest against the seemingly inescapable stress and pressures of the modern world. “All of us, women and men, are dealing with so many things thrust upon us,” she says. “I wonder how we survive, let alone be fruitful human beings”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Julian Broad for The Observer

One other thing that I want to source from that interview from The Independent relates to beauty. I think there is still a huge pressure of women (in music) to wear make-up and not look fresh-faced or too unadorned. Mvula is a naturally very beautiful woman - though there was a moment when there was a slight clash. As the interview explains, Mvula highlighted an issue that faces many women regarding natural beauty vs. being made-up and almost disguised:

“Mvula too is “poisoned” by society’s dictation that women are unacceptable in their natural state. When filming her latest video for the poignant “Show Me Love”, she admits to telling the director that although it is a heartbreaking song, she did not want to look “too raw” for fear of how people might react to her without makeup on. “I showed some friends this video and they said ‘Oh, you’re so beautiful’, but all I wonder is whether the record label will think I look overweight,” she says. It is a sad admission, but Mvula is speaking a universal truth about life as a woman today. “I want a way in that doesn’t mean you have to plaster your face, alter the colour of your skin or change the shape of your body in order to convey a certain message,” she continues. “It’s an interesting journey that we’re on together as women, but we at least need to have the dialogue openly now, even if things don’t change overnight”.

Before focusing more on The Dreaming Room, I am going to stick with The Independent interview. It possess many fascinating passages and intriguing sections. There was an interesting portion of the interview that I wanted to drop in without too much exposition, explanation or context:

“When we meet she is sitting on a sofa in a cosy, quiet room at Sony HQ in London, dressed casually with her signature shaved head but lacking the bright, warrior-esque makeup of her latest marketing campaign. The first thing she tells me is that she is tired, before showing me the stunning visual essay she developed to accompany her new music and to help those working with her to capture a sense of authenticity. Striking photos that inspired her, mainly taken from magazines, are surrounded by scrawled snippets straight from her imagination: ‘This album will be truly dark and beautiful’, ‘Life is not clean-cut’, ‘All images must be glorious and vulnerable at once’. The last song on the tracklist is simply titled “Who I Am”. There is clearly a theme.

Mvula has always loved paper and pictures and scribbling. “There was something grown-up about it to me, as a kid,” she says in a calm, unintentionally majestic tone. “I’ve always enjoyed having something tangible that you can hold and see in front of you. It seems to be how my brain works.” A bigger sound was important to her on this album, she wanted everything to be much more stylised to make the songs come alive. “It’s a selfish thing really,” she admits. “It’s about wanting to be heard”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hollyoak for Interview Magazine

I will get to Mvula’s new music in a minute. I feel her previous album, The Dreaming Room, is such an important release that warrants closer inspection and greater dissection. In 2016, Mvula spoke with Matt Mullen of Interview Magazine about the process and creation of a magnificent album:

“MULLEN: It’s been almost a year since, but tell me about the process for creating The Dreaming Room.

MVULA: It was a very different process from my first album in that I really had to take my time, and I’m really not good at taking that time, generally. So the first challenge was to be patient and not rush through writing something that I didn’t feel proud of, or wasn’t sure of. I also went on holiday, and then I was in New York, just hanging, going to friend’s shows, which helped me to create the energy to experience something outside of my own space, so that was good. And then when I felt ready, I started putting down words. Sometimes it would be 16 seconds of music, just because that was all I could manage. But it was a really good exercise in picking good ideas and running with them. Then I started thinking, “What kind of album do I want to make? What kind of sounds do I want to make?”

MULLEN: What kind of sounds did you want to make?

MVULA: I knew guitar was going to be a really big deal for me, because I wanted some of the energy of Fela Kuti, [who] I’ve been listening to a lot in the last couple years. I wanted that spirit to be in the music. I also was experimenting with synthesizers, like old analog synthesizers—I didn’t know what the hell I was doing—so that was an exciting experience, which again is different from the familiar process of writing these things, when I’d just sit at the piano. I think it was also new because of collaboration; I’ve never collaborated before, so when Nile Rodgers said, “I want to be on the album,” I thought it was some kind of sick joke. I didn’t think it was real.

MULLEN: How do you go about choosing collaborators? It sounds like sometimes they come to you, but what’s your thinking behind the kind of musicians you want to work with?

MVULA: Honestly, I must sound almost like an arrogant asshole, but when I say to you that people come to me I genuinely mean it. [both laugh] John Scofield, who plays guitar on the record, is another one. I didn’t realize that I have these resources at my fingertips”.

I will focus more on anxiety and how Mvula has battled it through the years. There is an interesting segment of the interview with The Guardian that I quoted from at the start - it explores the writing of The Dreaming Room and the importance of music:

“Mvula believes that she’s written “a beast of an album in The Dreaming Room. I never thought I’d be able to. I couldn’t be left in a room on my own. So how could I write?” She only got around this obstacle, she says, because for weeks on end Dionne and Mariama “found ways to be in the room with me, but not in the room”. They’ll have to do something similar again, soon, when Mvula takes to the road for a run of gigs. She feels guilty about this (“These are people who have lives of their own”), but at the same time she doesn’t feel ready to give up her career. Music has been “a way to grieve about my marriage, and make sense of what it means that my life has changed”.

With her computer open on the table, it suddenly occurs to Mvula that she can show me some of the curious processes that went into composing The Dreaming Room. While writing, she explains, she often recorded herself using her laptop’s camera – in case she should hit on a “moment in time thing” and later want to recapture it. Many of the videos Mvula shot are hours and hours long. We scroll through them. They tend to show her hunched over a keyboard in casual clothes or pyjamas. One video has her sitting in a desk chair, singing phrases into a microphone, when suddenly she whips off her headphones and disappears from view”.

There is a fascinating interview from the Evening Standard that was published this week. In addition to exploring the influence of the Eighties on her new album, we also get a sense of something that proved traumatic to Mvula: moving to a new label.

“There are a few lyrics on Laura Mvula’s forthcoming third album that will make the listener think she’s been through a nasty break-up. Take this, on Conditional: “I don’t cry no tears for you/I needed love unconditional.” Or this, from the comeback single, Safe Passage: “Never imagined I would ever be free from your story/Staring in the face of it, I finally see I’m everything I need.”

And they’d be right, but this isn’t necessarily romantic trauma. At the start of 2017, the Birmingham musician’s record label, Sony, told her they were dispensing with her services via a brief email. Both of her albums to date had received wide acclaim and prestigious Mercury Prize nominations, and the first, Sing to the Moon, had been a gold seller. Prince had messaged her to ask to be on a track on the second, The Dreaming Room, which he loved, but she had to turn him down because Nile Rodgers was already on it. Talk about a rock and a hard place. So this bad news came as no small surprise.

“I thought I was an important artist. I just remember feeling I’d been unfairly treated, not necessarily with the decision itself but with the manner in which it had been dealt with, which I thought was rude and careless,” she says. “I’d apologised so much for who I was right from the beginning. I’d tried to be the most palatable version of Laura that I could be, and played this game with real class and elegance, so to be let go in that way, I just felt, ‘Hold on a second!’ The least I could have had was a real conversation.”

She made the situation public straight away on Twitter, writing, “So sad Sony have dropped me today…” – an unusually honest way to put it given the tendency for musicians to reframe these situations more positively as their own decision, a regaining of creative control, a conscious uncoupling or similar. Witnessing the shocked public response must have felt a bit like attending your own funeral, a response to “my creative death,” as she puts it. Fellow musicians including Bastille, Charlotte Church and Hozier replied with encouraging words. Rag ‘n’ Bone Man said in the Guardian: “I can’t believe it… She’s by far my favourite songwriter in the UK at the moment”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hollyoak for Interview Magazine

Not to spend too much talking about something as severe and disruptive as anxiety…but I think that it is important. Mvula has lived with it for a long time. I feel it is worth highlighting. Many artists live with anxiety. So many interviews either skim past it or the artist does not feel comfortable discussing it. Going back to that interview from The Guardian, we get a sense of how it has affected Mvula – and how it initially manifested itself:

“At first it was the shortness of breath… Dizziness… Why do I want to run out of the house naked right now?” As time went on the attacks “began to manifest in different ways. It’s difficult to explain. My body starts spasming, I think I’m going to collapse… Difficulty swallowing sometimes… A feeling of struggling to stay in your skin.”

Episodes would occur most frequently when she was on her own. Mvula describes a common thing: “The freak-out in the shower. And I wish that was the term for something good – it’s not. When it happens I feel like my head’s about to explode. So I start shaking it violently, bang the door open, water spills out, this whole episode. When all I want is to have a fucking shower. After that, you have to deal with getting over the shame of calling for help.”

The sudden, disarming grin: “As you can imagine I was not in the greatest condition for what was about to happen in my life”.

Mvula was one of the domestic musical triumphs of 2013. She was everywhere, on chat shows, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York, on M&S ads, at the Mercury Awards (odds-on with the bookies to take that prize before it went, in the end, to James Blake). She refers to all this as a period of “coming to terms with a new reality. Even to only have a foot in the door, it was a strange, ongoing sensation, one that I couldn’t make sense of quick enough. My anxiety shot up from what it was. It shifted gears.”

If the upset of her parents’ divorce was “the top off a bottle”, the sudden beginnings of life as a public figure brought “everything pouring out, rocket-fast”. Her anxiety – and in particular her difficulty with being left alone – got worse. In London for gigs or other engagements she had to be accompanied at all times by her younger sister, Dionne, who was then a student in the capital. Themba would be everywhere with her in Birmingham. People outside the immediate family were deliberately kept in the dark about her anxiety. “There’s a natural fear that nobody will understand,” Mvula says. “Or they’ll think you’re making it up, or you’ve become a diva. I was ashamed. Embarrassed. Also, at that point, I was so ignorant of what the industry was, I thought: ‘If they find out about that they’ll drop me.’”

As her music career got busier, Dionne and Themba stopped being able to cope. “Everything was moving so fast.” Mvula finally told her manager. He was “heartbroken”, she says, that she’d waited so long. An assistant, Mariama Abudulai, was employed, so that at least Mvula could lean on someone who was paid to be there, with a smaller measure of guilt. Her manager knew Mvula was more or less “debilitated” by anxiety, “but it didn’t go beyond management. And we all know the machine is huge – you have the record label, you have publishing, publicity, agents. You have the video team, stylists, all the people who are making your career move forward. None of those guys knew.” They still don’t.

Two years ago, things got extremely difficult. “Naturally, all this was a huge strain on mine and Themba’s marriage. Then, a year ago, we split. I don’t want to say too much more. This anxiety thing is something that has dictated my life. I know it was a factor in my marriage breaking down. I wish that life could be compartmentalised: ‘That was because of that, and that was because of that.’ Really, I’m not sure. It was a combination of lots of things. I would say… quite honestly, that I failed him. I failed him as a wife.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Matt Hollyoak for Interview Magazine

It is heartbreaking reading about Mvula’s battle with anxiety. I feel it helps us learn more about her as an artist and the creative process. Not that the songs are re-contextualised and we misconstrue them. Before moving on to a review of Mvula’s new song, I want to come back to that interview from the Evening Standard. They head back to 2017 and documentary that discussed and explored Mvula’s experiences of living with anxiety:

“She has been very open about those bad days. In 2017 she made a television programme for the BBC titled Generation Anxiety, in which she revealed that she had been living with “a support worker-slash-carer, somebody that could be in my house with me so that I wasn’t alone because of my struggles with anxiety.” In an interview with the Observer a year earlier she spoke of panic attacks in the shower and said that her anxiety disorder was a factor in the breakdown of her marriage to the opera singer Themba Mvula.

“To talk about it in this controlled, story-like manner felt boundaried and yet helpful, because of the reaction it got,” she says. “There were so many ‘Me too’s. People were really liberated by hearing a story similar to their own”.

With a bubbling beat and strut that is reminiscent of Billy Ocean’s When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going, one is instantly in Eighties territory (that song was released in 1985). There is also a little undercurrent of Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean to the introduction. I really love the sound and how it is modern and fresh…though one can also think back to older tracks and get that brilliant, slightly nostalgic hit. There is something blissful and pure about the opening verse: “Woke up this morning with your touch on my mind/Your kisses take me on some heavenly ride/Go with me, go with you, no limit no/I don't regret nothing, with you I belong”. There is a deepness in Mvula’s voice that, I feel, gives the words greater urgency, soulfulness and importance. I love Mvula’s delivery and how beautiful her voice is. The composition races and has this insatiable rush. Bursting and fizzing with that Eighties vibe, the pre-chorus is one that is guaranteed to stick in your head: “Do what you want to do/Say what you want to say/Taking control of me/Don't make it too easy for me/Do what you want to do/Say what you want to say/Taking control of me/Don't make it too easy for me”. The biggest moment, as you would expect, comes in the chorus. I have mentioned how other artists this/last year have put the 1980s into the blend of their music. Jessie Ware and Dua Lipa have done it, as has Beabadoobee and many others. It is great that artists are affectionately nodding to the decade and doing so in an original way. Mvula’s Show Me is this instantly uplifting and hypnotic song that, I feel, is going to be one of the highlights of Pink Noise. The chorus finds Mvula enraptured and struck by something very special and powerful: “You got me/Tremblin' in the palm of your hand/You got me/I'm a slave to the sound of your command/You got me/Tremblin' in the palm of your hand/You got me/I'm a slave to the sound of your command”.

The verses provide something softer and more sensual than the bright and vivacious chorus. There is sexiness and tease. I get vibes of Prince and Madonna. Though, with everything she does, Laura Mvula is very much herself and not someone that is beholden to other artists. I am not sure who inspired the song, though it seems that they are both magnetic in their allure, but also trustworthy and have a real sense of reliability. The second verse finds the heroine losing herself and wanting to be immersed in this bond: “You see right inside of me no need to hide/Want you to take all and leave nothing behind/Go with me, go with you/No limit no/Beyond this attraction I'm lost in your soul”. By the time the pre-chorus and chorus come back around, one feels bonded and addicted to the track. It is a passionate and colourful explosion that shows Mvula is a very special talent! I think a lot of modern music is too joyless and does not emphasise positivity. It is nice to hear a song that is joyous and makes one feel better. There seems to be no bitter sting or sharp tail to the song - which makes Got Me so much more appealing and unexpected. The compelling nature of the chorus means that it is, in my opinion, more memorable than the verses (which are pretty damn good!). I love Mvula’s voice at all stages, though it hard to ignore the catchiness of the chorus! The verses provide story and that deeper vocal. I like how it switches and we get this nice flow throughout. A song that you will want to come back to time and time again, Got Me is a bright, brilliant and soulful jam that seems to have huge personal relevance. This is a rejuvenated and awestruck songwriter who has created a wonderful song. Safe Passage and Church Girl have already been released as singles. I love then, though I think Got Me is the finest of the trio.

I am looking forward to the new album, Pink Noise. There are a couple of interviews/features I want to source from. It seems like Mvula’s third studio album is going to be a change in direction from The Dreaming Room. CLASH brought us some details and information from Mvula around the release of her recent single, Church Girl:

“Laura Mvula will release new album 'Pink Noise' on July 2nd.

The singer appeared lost to us - taking a step back after her previous major label deal evaporated, she even considered teaching posts in East London.

But then the muse returned. Signalling her return earlier this year, Laura Mvula has now outlined plans for a new album.

'Pink Noise' lands on July 2nd through Atlantic Records, with new single 'Church Girl' easing Laura into a fresh chapter.

Laura Mvula comments: “I am not my story. For so long I identified as the things that happen in my life, the things I do, good or bad. I’m letting go of this mind-made ‘me’. I’m coming home to myself beyond the realm of form. I am not the thoughts in my head, or the things I achieve, or the shape of my haircut. I no longer ‘dance with the devil’ on my back. I’m basking in the light of knowing my true self, the deeper ‘I’”.

A lot of artists are exploring the Eighties lately. There has been a bit of a revival of that decade. One can say that the 1980s has always been at the forefront and it has not gone away. I feel, it terms of Pop and R&B, the sounds of that decade have been making a real impact the past year or two. Going back to the interview with the Evening Standard and we get a sense, of what Pink Noise will offer – and what influenced and compelled this new chapter and stage for Mvula:

“She discovered the term because she wanted to be able to describe the sounds she was going for, which can be better summarised for the layperson by saying simply, “really really Eighties”. The processed boom of the drums opening Safe Passage reminded me of the beginning of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, though Mvula says she was going more for Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight. Weighty analogue synthesizers dominate the songs. The rolling bassline and artificial horn blasts of the brilliant Got Me have strong echoes of When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going by Billy Ocean, no less. The ballad What Matters would fit nicely on the end credits of a John Hughes film and features an unrecognisably smooth contribution from rocker Simon Neil of Biffy Clyro.

It was an invitation to support David Byrne on tour in 2018 that began this bright new chapter. She no longer had the budget for a full band, so she and her musical director Troy Miller did it as a duo with as many synths as possible. “Most importantly, I was not concerned at all with how this was going to be received,” she says. “It literally wasn’t in my thought process. I didn’t have room any more.”

To end, I want to discuss Mvula’s recent gig, Under a Pink Moon. During the pandemic, artists have been adapting and finding ways to reach people. As this article explores, Mvula’s Under a Pink Moon was a definite standout from the streamed gigs that have been happening:

“If what we need is a liberating blast of escapism, we couldn’t do much better than this short but incendiary performance from Laura Mvula. In her first live concert in three years, the musician showcased new songs as well as a bold updated sound to older gems.

When Mvula emerged on the scene with her jazz-classical-soul-fusion debut in 2013 she was showered with award nominations: the BBC Sound Poll, the Mercury Prize, the BRITs Critics’ Choice, two BRIT Awards and two MOBOs. It’s now nearly five years since the Birmingham Conservatoire graduate released her Ivor Novello-winning, Mercury-nominated second album The Dreaming Room.

Plaudits aside, Mvula has been through it: anxiety-fuelled panic attacks, divorce from her musician husband, and being dropped from her record label Sony – by email.

Under a Pink Moon showed her rejuvenated and ready to take on the pop world, under a new record deal with Atlantic. While other “live” streamed shows during lockdown have involved beautifully crafted cinematic experiences sometimes blended, documentary-style, with interviews, Mvula gave us a full-on pop concert, with lit-up stage and visuals, choreography, slinky dancers and striking costumes (mostly black leotards, stiletto boots and shoulder pads). Sparks flew from the moment she emerged, resplendent in a bright pink jacket with enormous shoulders, bursting out of the laptop screen into the living room with drama and emotion, from fragility to empowerment.

Channelling the spirit of her late mentor and fan Prince, a handful of thrilling new songs showed off a new 80s synth-pop vibe. “Safe Passage” shimmered with Aha synths and layers of choral backing vocals.

The punchy “Conditional” told of relationship woes. “Another blow to the ego, a victim of conditional love”, she asserted rhythmically to driving drum beats and bassy synths. With eruptions of synthesised saxophones, she declared “I don’t cry no tears for you! I needed more. Unconditional!”

Under a glittering mirrorball, her duet “What Matters”, with Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil, was a seductive, romantic balm, the rock band’s smooth-voiced frontman proving a gorgeous accompaniment to her alternately tender and powerful vocals. The lively “Green Garden” had an 80s funk makeover, complete with pink keytar and exuberant synths.

When she put the pink jacket back on, her different body language had transformed. With eyes downcast and tender vocals laying bare her vulnerability, she began her second album’s heartbreaking “Show Me Love”, with softly pulsing synths and electronic beats in place of the original’s strings. It was moving, and followed by a similarly revamped “Sing to the Moon”, while her gloriously layered vocals remained. The promised news of an imminent album are more anticipated than ever – she dropped a four-track EP of reworked hits, 1/f, immediately after the show. What a comeback”.

I am looking forward to Pink Noise. The iconic Laura Mvula is someone I am keen to feature more, as she is such an interesting and inspiring artist. Got Me is a fantastic and memorable taste of what her new album is going to offer! Make sure that you pre-order it. I shall leave things there. It is always such a treat to receive new music from…