Archives October 2024

Though she just released her first single last month, Indigenous singer Tia Wood has been steadily gaining fans since early 2020. The 25-year-old first amassed a following on TikTok, where she often champions her Cree and Salish heritage through songs on the app (she has more than two million followers). Now, she’s ready to bring her unique sound to the mainstream music scene with the release of two new tracks: “Dirt Roads” and “Losing Game”—her first singles since officially signing with Sony Music last year. “It’s been really relieving to finally pour a piece of my heart out into the world after keeping people waiting for so long,” Wood tells Vogue. “I’m so thankful for all the love and support we’ve been getting on these first two tracks. Little Tia cannot believe it still!”

Hailing from the Saddle Lake Cree Nation in Alberta, Canada, Wood was always destined to make music. Growing up, she often toured the powwow trails, where she would sing and dance with her family—some of whom are members of the Grammy Award–winning group Northern Cree. After sharing her singing on TikTok, she quickly attracted the attention of Sony Music, becoming one of the first Indigenous women signed to the label. “It was honestly surreal,” says Wood. “I still have trouble processing it sometimes. Growing up with lack of representation made it feel impossible to dream dreams such as this, and to be one of the first Indigenous women signed with my label is something I could’ve only dreamed of as a child.”

Last spring, Tyson found herself in Los Angeles—and at a loose end. The musician and born-and-bred Londoner had initially traveled to the US to perform at South by Southwest. When the offer to crash at a family friend’s annex for six weeks arose, she decided to take it, renting a fancy car—“It was cheap, though, because it’s LA,” she says, with a grin—and meeting up with her close collaborator, musician Oscar Scheller, to start working on some new material at his home studio. Where in London, they’d usually try and squeeze in sessions between their hectic daily lives, spending back-to-back days devoting themselves entirely to writing unlocked something new. “Stepping outside of the daily grind in London allowed me to think in a different way,” Tyson recalls. “I felt inspired in a different way.”

The product of that time can be heard on Tyson’s new EP, Chaos, which arrives on November 15 via the independent London-based label LuckyMe. Across 10 tracks, she showcases the full breadth of her musical identity, flitting from the blend of soulful vocals and clattering two-step beats on the cheeky lead single, “Jumpstart,” to the clipped R&B groove of “Carousel,” on which Tyson sings of seeking joy and escapism in all the wrong places, to the rippling synths and trip-hop percussion on the mournful kiss-off to a lover that is “300Khz.” It’s an impressively self-assured journey through a range of genres made cohesive by Tyson’s starkly confessional lyrics and smooth-as-silk voice.

In the autumn of 2022, Nilüfer Yanya found herself at a crossroads. The British singer-songwriter—whose first two albums of intricate, emotionally charged indie pop had marked her as a fast-rising star with an unusual cross-genre appeal—was finally able to step off the endless hamster wheel of songwriting, recording, promoting, and performing. For the first time in her career, she had the opportunity to press pause and consider her next steps with real clarity of mind.

It was a little daunting. “I think I’ve become more observant of how I work,” Yanya says. “I didn’t want to rush back into writing another album because it’s important to have a breather in between. But I didn’t really have a broader understanding of the process before. Now, by the third album, I kind of get it. I understand my habits a bit more.” Given the challenges facing touring musicians post-pandemic, determining when things felt stable enough for Yanya to take that step back was a trick. “It took a while to get to that point,” she continues. “No creative job is ever super secure. So you really have to feel it from within, without getting too deep. You have to be able to say, ‘No, I’ve got this. This is fine.’ You’re allowed to do that.”

You can hear the rich rewards of that downtime on Yanya’s breathtaking new album, My Method Actor, released today on her new label Ninja Tune. Across 11 tracks, she doubles down on her signatures: guitar playing that veers from a grungy, reverb-laden fuzz to intricate acoustic noodling; playful percussion that can sound as much like classic rock drumming as it can delicate, syncopated trip-hop; her quietly devastating way with lyrics. (Plus, of course, there’s Yanya’s smoky, androgynous voice, which possesses a searing intimacy that makes you feel like you’re listening in on a secret.) This masterful blending of genres gives the album a quality that sounds slightly out of time, but also, somehow, firmly of the moment.