How Aluna learned to live as herself

In the white-dominated sphere of dance music, she valiantly carved her place within it, as a Black woman, with electro-R&B duo AlunaGeorge. While the synergy between herself and producer George Reid meant that making music came as second nature, Aluna was climbing hills while her eyes were cast skyward, at the mountains. “I thought to myself, ‘Well, what scares you the most? Starting a solo project? Let’s do that.’”

Renaissance is Aluna’s debut as an artist in her own right, and her control from the first noise onwards is absolute. What you hear is the director’s cut: every aspect of its architecture was her design, from the familiar territory of song writing and co-producing, to proving her chops as a multi-instrumentalist. When I ask her if this creative freedom was something she had always craved, her response is surprising: “No, it was definitely something I didn’t want to do.” She basked in the symbiosis with Reid; their styles felt like a second skin, with her gossamer melodies and his sinuous production. But there was a part of Aluna that had never been tapped into.

“When you’re collaborating, you create space for the other person. When you’re in a duo, that space is fifty percent. It has to touch the places for both of you which are important,” she explains. “For Renaissance, I didn’t have to make space for anyone else. I could make music purely about my cultural heritage, about being a woman – a Black woman – and I didn’t have to allow for any kind of balance or neutrality, or anything like that.”

Aluna’s upbringing, as a Black girl growing up in the white suburbs of London, has allowed her to see the world through a unique lens. “I was used to being a fish out of water,” she says. “I didn’t really challenge the status quo.” In that same vein, navigating the white dance industry and trying to occupy a place within it meant that she didn’t flinch when she had some bitter pills to swallow. “I was fully prepared to make a dance record and have everyone disagree that it was a dance record and be side lined for not making traditional dance music. I had accepted that.”

But on May 25, 2020, when George Floyd was murdered after a white police officer knelt on his neck for eight minutes despite him pleading, “I can’t breathe”, the world was ready for a different kind of conversation. The aftermath of Floyd’s death gave her the confidence to create a safe to, at last, be herself. “The history of dance music is black”, she emphasises, “so why should I feel like the genre is dictated by white people their opinions?” But before George Floyd, she says, “every kind of barrier, and every new kind of oppressive segregation within the music industry was something I would just kind of accept as part of the battle - just the general battle of success. I accepted it because it felt almost like my choice to go against the grain and to not do what's expected of me.”

Renaissance was still evolving as the world caught up to it. “I was really seeing a Black renaissance happening,” Aluna says, which was what drew her close to the word as a namesake for her album. She began to see bubbles of activity of Black girls claiming a stake in white places, like cosplay and skating. “I’d never seen that before. It must be really scary to be a Black girl and then just decide to do something like cosplay in one of the whitest communities there has ever been. I was like, ‘That’s really inspiring. If she can do that, I should be able to make a dance record.’” This thought marked the beginning of a musical renaissance that was entirely Aluna’s.

"I picked every single person that I worked with. When people ask me what it’s like to feel like you’ve made it, that’s really what it’s about."

The goal with this record, she shares, is “to get one step closer to being able to live as myself.” Brick by brick, she has started to build that world, and in turn, build it for the other girls who had felt out of place as she did. The “Black renaissance” to which she belongs has arisen from, at last, being able to have conversations about the systemic racism they are faced with, and for their words not to fall on deaf ears. “When I decided to do this record, I was like, ‘Let me just try pushing this one step further, because maybe I haven’t embraced enough of myself within the music industry to really get that sense of feeling that I have a right to exist on this planet.”

Part of being able to capture her own experiences was having the right people onside to achieve it. “I picked every single person that I worked with,” she says. “When people ask me what it’s like to feel like you’ve made it, that’s really what it’s about. If you can choose who you want to work with, that’s like, wowww… you’re not waiting for someone to throw you a bone!” Every single collaborator on Renaissance has the distinction of being someone who Aluna has worked with before, from dance purveyor SG Lewis, to electronic kingpin KAYTRANADA. “I'd never done that before,” she shares. “It was always like, one song, done! I was like, "Oh, well... I could just… change my mind about that!"

Bringing herself out of her own comfort zone was only half the battle – to make Renaissance, everyone would know how it would feel to be the fish out of water. “Very often, I’d be asking producers to do something that they’ve never done before, and I’d have to talk them through every step of the sound I was looking for.” The results were interesting: “some of them were absolutely diabolical, some of them great, and some didn’t make the cut. It was refreshing as much as it was a challenge to have a different producer coming in every day.”

Aluna found delight in breaking her own rules. The infectious, afro-inflected “Get Paid” featuring Princess Nokia and Jada Kingdom saw her do something she swore she would never do. That ‘rule’ was interpolation, when an artist uses adapts a melody from a previous song and integrates it into their own. Aluna weaved Mr Vegas’ dancehall classic “Heads High”. She explains of the process: “If I ever came up with a melody that sounded even a little bit like anyone else’s, I would immediately have to scrap it. It wasn’t just a pride of originality thing, but it was also that I didn’t want to think I couldn’t come up with my own melodies – and I didn’t want a lawsuit.” But, she insists with a smirk, “He’s very happy with his percentage, my love.”

"I decided that I was going to break the mould in every way that I could, and one of those ways was retaining my individuality."

Without producer Soko, Aluna believes it’s a territory she would never venture into. “He’s just one of those producers where he knows how to energise you and give you the confidence to try something new,” she says. “He was like, ‘Just do it. Why not? Why don’t you just do it and then we’ll ask him and see if he minds.’ Then I was like…” Aluna gasps with mock outrage, “’No! I couldn’t possibly!’, and he pointed out, ‘But you’re having so much fun with it. Just go with it.’”

Recording an album is a remarkable feat in itself, but the one experience perhaps more remarkable than that was becoming a mother. Her daughter, Amaya, was only months old when Aluna decided to pursue Renaissance. “When I fell pregnant and I was writing this record, I decided that I was going to break the mould in every way that I could, and one of those ways was retaining my individuality.” When so many new mothers feel that self-sacrifice is a given, Aluna set out to prove that she was both a mother and a woman in her own right. “I had always visualised being a mum as an opportunity to show a child how amazing and enriching it is to have a career, be a full person, be an individual, and not be homogenised with the child.”

Every dimension of Aluna’s identity has been interwoven into Renaissance. But “Envious”, one of her crowning glories on the album, explores something far deeper than the romantic trivialities you would expect. “After George Floyd, I started to do a lot of analysis and research, educating myself historically. I enjoy certain types of jealousy – I enjoy being jealous of Beyoncé and Rihanna and Lauryn Hill – but the jealousy that drives me crazy is racial jealousy, where I’m jealous of white privilege and the doors that it opens for creative freedom.”

This revelation about the inner workings of the music industry had manifested itself in one of her first creative ventures, the electronic band My Toys Like Me. Aluna saw their whimsical, diaphanous sound being pursued by white artists, yet with radically different results: “I’ve always seen how restrictive it is for Black people and Black women, especially, to be expressive in all the nuanced ways that white musicians are able to and celebrated for.” She saw white artists being met with support from the ground up, from families to marketing moguls and stardom. “That’s the kind of jealousy that cuts me to the core,” she says.

It’s a universally acknowledged fact that the music industry is steered by white men. It was through her examination of its infrastructure that Aluna began to understand the racist mentality she had been spoon-fed since the beginning. “When I first started, I really thought that successful white men in the industry actually knew better than I did, that they were somehow more equipped and had more license to tell me what to do from this position of success, power, wealth and white supremacy. I never questioned it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Yes, sir. You want me to do this? I will do my best. Hmm hmm, because you must know what you’re talking about, and I’m just a Black girl, so…’”

"Now, if anything goes wrong, I can take responsibility and deal with it myself. This world is not as chaotic, random or wild as we think.”

While she was always able to retain her autonomy in her creative process, she realised very soon that when it came to talking business, they were the ones who held all the cards. Eventually, she realised that their ‘authority’ was a carefully constructed illusion. “There was this moment where I was like, ‘Hold on, these are just grown-up babies that happened to catch wind of something that was gonna work. If you just throw on some ego and entitlement, and a bunch of cash…’ - all of that was what made me think it was real, somehow.” It became clear, then: the music industry was nothing more than a house of cards: “This person in this board room, or this corner office, hasn’t got a fucking clue what he’s talking about.”

She shook off her deference and thought to herself, “I cannot believe I’ve been under the impression that these people have so much authority over my life! Wild!” She would watch the bravado of the white men she’d collaborate with, whose objective lack of success didn’t shake their absolute self-confidence. “Because I’m a Black woman,” she says, “I’m not thinking that way. I’m so subservient, and I give authority to other people to literally tell me what to do. When I did that, everything would get weird and fucked up, and I’d be like, ‘Why is this happening?’ – now, if anything goes wrong, I can take responsibility and deal with it myself. This world is not as chaotic, random or wild as we think.”

While she can’t own to having overcome the feelings of envy she had towards white musicians, she learned to love what that feeling drove her to do. At last, she has reached the hard-won point of learning to not only accept - but love - exactly who she was. While she is rightfully jaded about the music industry and its systemic racial inequality, the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement gives her hope that their vibrations are resonating through the chain of command. “I think we will see more change this year than we have ever seen before,” she says, from festival line-ups, all the way to the marketing money finally being distributed with inclusivity and much-needed diversity in mind.

Something that often played on Aluna’s mind in the early stages of her career was that one in two artists die from the mental pressure of being an artist. For that reason, her mental health was something she prized above all – even success. “I realised that I could sacrifice my mental health and probably be more successful,” she says, “in that I could put more pressure on myself to be very, very transparent and have all of my life publicised on socials; allow people to drag me if I make a mistake – there are so many things you could do, and all of those things really take a toll on your mental stability.”

She tells me about her ‘success bag’ – something she had to repack and rearrange, carefully and considerately. “To me, success as an artist is having a process that means you get to retain a certain level of mental and physical health; live off your creativity and preserve your relationship with it, even though the industry tries to eat you up from the inside. All of those things, I call ‘balance’ – but you don’t get something for nothing,” she adds, firmly.

Success is something she believes is ingredient-based. She would let go of the idea of fame in order to protect her sanity. “When you first start out,” she explains, “you get the ‘default bag’.” In it, she says, there is a number one record, a Grammy, fame, social media stardom and arena tours. But for Aluna, there were some things she would have to let go of to allow room for things that were more important. “Some personal life, I put that in there;” she shares, “being loved as a successful woman. I was like, ‘I think I’m going to put that in the bag. I’m going to swap that for public, failed, nightmarish celebrity relationships. How about that?’ While she jadedly accepts that the right partner can propel your career in far more ways than one, she wanted no part of it.

In the end, the happiness she had been searching for was found in freedom. “For this record, I was basically an investor,” she says. “My idea of success was being able to spend my own money on doing extra parts of the process, writing so many songs and working through them all with so many different producers to do what we call ‘the last ten percent’ – the magic stuff. Before, I could never have that power as an independent artist. That felt like such a luxury, and it was so rewarding.” Bringing in truly exceptional artists to collaborate with her, and relishing that process of self-discovery, was the ultimate prize for Aluna.

While AlunaGeorge has been put on the backburner while the duo creatively branches out, she assures me that this will not be the last we hear of them. But Renaissance is an album anchored in the present, the here and now: the only thing that we have any influence over. Her hopes are simple: “I want it to be received, in a sense, like a kind of doorway. If they were to open it, and they were to walk through it, I hope they find a place where it’s completely okay to be themselves.”