INTERVIEW: Mahalia drops second album 'IRL': "What I felt when writing this record was confidence. I was able to be myself and trusted to do my job in the right way."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
The UK’s Mahalia releases her second studio album IRL today, and while it is rooted strongly in the trauma of a broken relationship and inspired by discoveries made during Mahalia’s therapy sessions, she wants everyone to remember we should not try and suppress the bad times. “We’re all fixated on how we can make ourselves better,” she says. “But I want people to also reminisce on lovely or painful situations they’ve lived through and how they’ve helped shape the people they are now.”
Mixing R&B, soul and pop IRL is a dazzling album which confirms Mahalia’s status as one of music’s truly special artists. Her music is honest, vulnerable, warm, beguiling and most importantly is incredibly connective - Mahalia’s relatable stories and melodies have a way of burrowing into your soul, as if she is singing directly to you.
The album starts with third single ‘Ready’ which is almost a reclamation of self. Battling imposter syndrome after her musical breakthrough, which over the past 5 years has resulted in 3 BRIT Awards nominations and one Grammy nomination, therapy sessions revealed how her own self-talk was not allowing her to acknowledge her phenomenal success. ‘You thought I was finished / You thought time was up / Secretly I did too,’ she sings before owning her achievements - ‘No matter how I'm feeling, gotta take a minute to celebrate my winnings…nobody can take that from me / Cause I gave you the music your soul needs’
‘In My Head’, featuring Joyce Wrice, is a smooth mellow R&B track with Mahalia and Wrice’s vocals working gorgeously together. Lyrically it looks at the pain after a relationship ends and not wanting to let go. ‘If only you had never done wrong / You could always be right in my head / I want to leave it alone, I don’t know if I can’.
Alongside Wrice and Destin Conrad, IRL include a number of power collaborations. Pop superstar JoJo features on second single ‘Cheat’, a feisty clapback to a cheating partner who has been caught out. Rapper Stormzy makes a guest appearance on ‘November’, which is a beautifully gentle, tender love song about staying by the love of your life forever. ‘I’ll be right there til the flame turns to an ember’
‘Hey Stranger’ continues the theme of relationships, but from a more heartbreaking angle. It is a beautiful, melancholic, pared back track that sees Mahalia struggling with men who are unable to commit. ‘You can’t have my love for free / And then decide in the morning we’re just friends’. There is a real vulnerability in Mahalia’s vocal that expertly conveys her frustration, hurt, longing and pain.
Inspirations from earlier decades crop up on several tracks. On ‘Isn’t It Strange’ she brings in elements of electronic pop mixed with rap and an early 2000s vibe, while the glorious ‘Wassup’ has a soundscape that in places is reminiscent of the 1990s trance and trip-hop sound, while still retaining Mahalia’s contemporary sound.
The final three tracks of the album are something of sonic outliers compared to the soundscape of the previous tracks. ‘Lose Lose’ brings in an acoustic guitar foundation with a swirly, indeterminate background as she sings of a relationship that has perhaps reached the end of its life. ‘I don’t want to lose you / I don’t want have to chose me over you’. ‘Goodbyes’ is arguably the most traditional pop sounding track on the album. A sparse opener gives way to an insistent beat, distorted vocals and chiming synths.
The album closes with the title track ‘IRL’ which again opens with an acoustic guitar before incorporating more traditional R&B sounds before veering into more experimental territory in the final section, with extended instrumental breaks and a change of pace and structure. Lyrically, it tells the story of Mahalia’s rise to fame, ending with an acknowledgement that she continues to work on herself and inner confidence: ’I just want to be in real life what I chose to be when I’m in my mind’.
IRL is Mahalia at her absolute best and is surely a contender for one of the greatest albums of 2023. An album that has divine melodies and sounds to bliss out to, along with moving and relatable stories for your reflective moments, you will carry it within you long after it finishes playing. Expect Mahalia’s star to rise even higher with this release. We recently sat down with her to chat all about he album’s creation.
Hi Mahalia! It is a joy to talk to you. How are you finding life at the moment?
How am I finding life? That's quite a nice question, actually. I think I'm like half good, half anxious all the time. That it's not an alien feeling. I think I felt exactly this when my first record was coming out, to be honest. But I'm still doing therapy once a week, and I'm still kind of figuring out how to keep myself calm through this process.
I think there's plenty of room for chaos and anger and all the excitement and all the feeling and let's face it, your whole album IRL is all the chaos and all the feelings sung at us with such a big beaming smile, which just makes me so happy. Speaking of let's talk about ‘In My Bag’, because when I first heard it, I was like, this is like if Ariana’s ‘Thank U, Next’ and Lily Allen’s ‘Smile’ had a baby.
Oh, I love that! Oh my god, that is pretty amazing. I love that record.
It's a great record.
Everything that I'm talking about is really how I was feeling at that point. When I wrote ‘In My Bag’ I basically spent about six months trying to write and I was trying to figure out what the tapestry of this album was going to look like, how it was going to go, what I was going to talk about, the sonic, all of that stuff. Then when I got in the studio, I just genuinely wanted to write a song about this feeling, about feeling like I've got it, I’ve figured out my world, and I'm here. There's a lot of happiness in that song, I tried to inject a little bit of comedy in there, I'm not sure everybody will get it! I feel like everybody, at some point in their life, needs a moment where they're just able to flex, where they're just able to say, ‘This is who I am, and I think I'm kind of amazing’. So that was kind of my moment to really get to do that.
That's awesome, and this is going to be such a mantra for everyone doing just that. I obviously can’t pull apart every single song, but like ‘Wassup’ for me has this Janet Jackson The Velvet Rope era kind of vibe, which I was just all over. You have the ballad at the end with ‘Goodbyes’, however, we can't go past ‘Cheat’. Oh my god, what a track. First of all, were you just obsessed with JoJo when you were a kid?
Yeah I was, completely! She was the first feature that I got for the record and I was like, ‘I don't really know how I'm going to top this moment’. I'd met her a couple of times and I'd done the fangirling, and then this was the point where I was like, okay, now I'm going to ask an artist that I respect, who I am assuming also respects me, whom I have loved for many years, to be on my record, and it just kind of came together really, really easily. Which is not always how it goes, some of the other features took loads longer to come together. But she was just really, really up for it. When I got her vocals, I was on tour, I was sat on my tour bus in America, and I made my whole live team sit in the living room with me to listen to it! It was just crazy, which is kind of a shit word, but that really is just how it was.
This is the things of dreams though, your Hannah Montana moment. Little Mahalia going ‘one day, I'm gonna sing with JoJo, we're gonna do our own ‘The Boy Is Mine’, but it's gonna be better’. Because actually, the boy doesn't deserve any of this!
Yes, exactly, exactly! When I first started listening to JoJo, I was probably about seven or eight, so I didn't really understand all the concepts that she was talking about, but she was the only artist who kind of looked more like me age wise, which now I'm older makes sense because she was so young. At that time, all the kind of people that we loved were the Hannah Montanas, and it was the Miley Cyrus’s and the Disney kids and that kind of age group. So she really feels like somebody that has been a part of my world forever, which is really, really, lovely and at times very surreal. Even sometimes now, when I'm promoting it, I'm like ‘I can't believe that I'm tagging JoJo in this, this makes no fucking sense!’ But we're here and I'm very, very proud of that one.
On that note, you’ve had some incredible moments in your career, and it's still going. What was your ‘Oh shit, this is what I do now’ moment?
I think I've had a few of those, I'm still having them to be honest. I think the first time I felt like this was probably my first tour in 2018. When I was able to go on tour, and sell out shows and see people and then hear them singing, that was probably the first time that I was like, ‘Oh, God, I've done the thing that I've been trying to do’. Live moments are always the moments that kind of made me go ‘whoa!’
Having the audience singing your songs back at you.
Yeah, I don't know if I ever really get used to that, to be honest. And sometimes I didn't know how to respond. ln the past few months, a lot of the topic in therapy has been me potentially feeling a bit of imposter syndrome, potentially feeling ‘I don't know if people still want to listen to me or want to come to my shows’. And I think that feeling is something that comes up for artists a lot. Talking to other people, I've realised it's not just me that feels that. I walk out on the stage, and it could almost look like I'm not enjoying it, because I'm just staring at everybody like ‘what the fuck are you doing here?’ I have those feelings over and over and over again.
I think that's superb, that's where the longevity is because you're always going to be hella excited to be there and performing! You've always got such swagger, you always have this truth to your music, but without it being, lame, millennial truth! There's a lot of comedy to it. I feel like you've leaned into a little bit more on IRL. It's a big question, but how do you feel that you've developed or you've moved in the way you write songs for IRL?
Well, it's funny, because I wrote a lot of this album with my partner. We met, because he was a writer, an artist, and I was really interested in his music, and we just kind of started writing together. There is something really beautiful when you're able to sit with people that you genuinely connect with, and are able to be open with. On this record, I decided really early on that I was going to work with the same group of people for most of it. Doing that meant that I was able to completely bare my soul and allow everybody in the room to know, ‘this is what I'm talking about today - I want to say this and everybody be on board with it’. On this record, really what I felt when writing was confidence. I was able to be myself. There's a song on the album called ‘Goodbyes’, which is one of my favourites, it started off as a guitar vocal song and then I said to everybody, ‘I want this to go from this into a dance record’. The whole room was staring at me, like, ‘Are you absolutely sure?’ And I was like ‘yes’. In order for me to perfectly explain this feeling of heartbreak and chaos, I need it to feel like we go from this soft moment into this mental movement and beat and sonic because that's how it feels for me. So with this record, I just felt confident and trusted to do my job in the right way.
IRL is out now via Warner Music Australia. You can buy and stream here.
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