Nyah Grace blends genres in divine second album.

Nyah Grace is a UK-based American singer whose debut album, Honey-Coloured, introduced her as a vital new voice in 2020. This month sees the release of its successor, Divinely Devoted.

While she’s most often labelled as neo-soul, the album draws on a variety of influences. “‘Aphrodite’ pulls an Afrobeat inspiration. ‘Obvious’ is leaning a bit of pop,” she explains. “I like to think that they’re all my combined sound. I like to think that they're pulling from different areas of music to make this big genre.”

Signed to British label Padawan Productions at just 16, Grace began spending increasing amounts of time in the UK and by 2021 had moved permanently to Manchester, enrolling at the Royal Northern College of Music. “The whole music scene, I feel I align way more with it here than I do back home,” Grace says. “There’s so many more gig opportunities. I feel people love live music a little bit more. In my heart, I feel British, more so than American now, especially since I've been here for so long.”

Although she continued performing alongside her studies, Grace took a complete break from recording for several years. “It's going to sound cheesy, but it didn't feel right,” she says. The further she travelled from the newly arrived teenager from rural Oregon who made Honey-Coloured, the more difficult she found it to conceptualize her next record. “I’ve changed so much since then. I’ve found it hard to translate that kind of growth into my new music.”

The deadlock was broken by a trip to LA to work with De’Jour Thomas, with whom she clicked immediately. “I felt like I’d finally found my sound. And once I was writing music then everything else just fell into place.” In retrospect, she sees that the break she took between albums was a healthy thing to do. “There’s this weird thing in the music industry that you have to be working 110% for 10 years to be able to break through. I do feel that rest period, and finding myself period, was really, really necessary to be able to make the music that I'm making now.”

“I feel there’s very, very few moments in music-making where you love absolutely everything about it. I think that song is one of those moments where I literally love every single beat, everything I’m saying, and was really, really proud of everything we were creating”

— Grace

The lead single from the album, “Only Mine”, was the first song she and Thomas co-wrote. “It definitely established the standard that we were after,” says Grace. “We wrote that song in a day and a half, and everything felt right.” The album opener, “Back of the Cab”, was similarly quick to compose. “It was crazy, the way we made it. We wrote and recorded 90% of it in one day.” After the initial meeting in LA, they’d booked three weeks to record together at the Dairy Studios in Brixton, London. Most days, Thomas would already have done an hour’s work before Grace arrived. “I'm not a morning person, so I would come in at 10 or 11, and De’Jour would be like, ‘I made this, this morning. What do you think? I'm just messing around.’ Immediately I was like, ‘OK, I freaking love that.’” Although she usually prefers to be involved with every aspect of the music, she trusted her writing partner completely. “He's a crazy whizz with chords and instrumentation, stuff like that. I feel that me and De’Jour, we get each other, so everything he does I absolutely love. I was completely on board.”

Grace therefore focused on coming up with the right lyrics. “I wanted it to be a story of being in the back of an Uber, really, really drunk and complaining to the Uber driver about the shitty night you've had, about your friends being dicks and all this stuff. Which I've never actually experienced, but it was a bit of a storytelling thing.” The lyric inspired Thomas to create a soundworld based on the scenario, at one point switching the song to sound as though it’s playing on the radio in the cab. “That was so genius. We had so much fun with it. We have different sound effects – the honking and the chattering. It was really, really fun to make.”

The album closes in a very different mood, with “I Can’t Love You the Same”, another track that dates back to their first writing session in LA. “It was almost spiritual for the both of us, creating that song. We finished it, and we listened to it, no joke, 20 times over and over again, just kept playing it. I feel there's very, very few moments in music-making where you love absolutely everything about it. I think that song is one of those moments where I literally love every single beat, everything I'm saying, and was really, really proud of everything we were creating.” Later in the process, they had the idea to add a choir. They were on different sides of the Atlantic so Thomas FaceTimed Grace while recording the choir. “It was the craziest thing in my career – I literally felt like Beyoncé. It was one in the morning for me, so I had to take off my bonnet and look presentable because I was, like, this is my celebrity moment! They were absolutely lovely, they killed it. It was just a joy to make that song.”

Although not planned that way, the ten songs on Divinely Devoted are thematically linked, telling different stories about relationships. While some are fictional or loosely inspired by people she knows, others draw more directly on Grace’s own life. The voicemail on “Fall into You” evokes a very personal memory. “I was going through a really bad breakup and transitional period of my life, where it was really hard. I'm really quite good about being on the other side of the world away from my family, but it's always the moments where something like that happens, and I’m like, ‘I want to be home with my mom.’ That was one of those moments where my mom left me the voicemail, and at the beginning she says, ‘Oh, you have voicemail, that's great,’ because it's a running joke in my family – my voicemail box is always full because I've never deleted any voicemails.” So when De’Jour asked if she had any voicemails they could use on the track, it was the obvious choice. “It's such a reminder that I am so fortunate in the family that I have. I've got an incredible support system, and I know that's something that not a lot of people have. Listening back to it, it makes me want to cry – it’s really, really special to me.”

That sense of security may be the reason Grace isn’t interested in blindly chasing wealth and fame. Her great-aunt, a former backing vocalist for the likes of Luther Vandross and Chic, is something of a role model – “that's a big inspiration for me, seeing someone who does music in a different way and was really successful with it, and was able to fulfil her creative needs in that way.” Grace is focused on achieving goals that are meaningful to her, such as playing a Tiny Desk Concert one day. “I want to make my art, and I really want people to respond to it, and I really want it to do well, but I don't think I need to be mega, mega famous and make millions for it to be fulfilling for me.”

Divinely Devoted is out 20th June.

Author: Rachel Goodyear