Black Box Sessions: anaiis

In a 1994 copy of Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, famed educator, author, theorist and activist bell hooks wrote: “The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.” Her words speak to an innate sense of wonder, how truth is all too often stranger than fiction. While hook inks the meaning of art, French-Senegalese artist anaiis (whose name is in lowercase as tribute to hooks) translates that ethos into Sound.

On her forthcoming album Devotion & The Black Divine, the songs swell with emotional clarity and a growing sense of homecoming. Not to a place, but to the self. anaiis seems to be in conversation with the reverence of nature, recognising our own divinity, and therefore our wholeness in both chaos and beauty. She crafts a body of work that gently pushes herself (lovingly, as you’ll come to learn by listening through) to the edges of her comfort Zone.

New motherhood has been a core influence across the project. It deepened anaiis’ understanding of how to react with grace, create with freedom, and captures the reality of being human, unposed and unpredictable. That internal expansion is audible across the record. It leans into the idea that selfhood is something in motion; much like Octavia Butler’s reminder that “God is Change. Everything you touch you change, everything you change, changes you.” Like a tree shaped by its environment, growth isn’t always linear – there are knots and bends formed as it adapts to shifting climates. anaiis toys with this idea that the very nature of existence is to move fearlessly through what is unknowable. That search for freedom, in sound and in spirit, runs through every note.

Where previous work offered catharsis and rupture, Devotion & The Black Divine draws strength from slowness and softness. It opens with “Something is Broken,” a track that lays past pain to rest and clears the ground for something more rooted to take shape. The album signals a deeper commitment to intuition and marks an ongoing transition that began during her time in Brazil, when a collaborative mini-album, anaiis & Grupo Cosmo, was created through live improvisation in just a week, with her newborn son in tow – marking a pivotal expansion in sound and approach.

A string of recent releases have acted as prelude to this new chapter: a reimagining of Lauryn Hill’s “To Zion” performed at Chaka Khan’s Meltdown Festival, and two remixes of “B.P.E. (Black People Everywhere)” – a standout from the Brazil sessions – by Sango and Hagan, playlisted on BBC Radio 6 Music. Each release adds dimension to the whole, tracing a lineage of diasporic collaboration and cross-cultural kinship.

Born in Toulouse, raised between Dublin, Dakar, Oakland, and now rooted in London, anaiis' footholds have shaped a perspective founded in movement, flux, community and personal transformation. After her debut single “Nina” in 2018, anaiis released this is no longer a dream in 2021, featuring Chronixx, Sjava and Topaz Jones, with art direction by Ib Kamara and Rafael Pavarotti. She went on to support Daniel Caesar on his UK tour, share stages with Erykah Badu and Nick Hakim, headline a sold-out Barbican show, and speak at TEDxLondonWomen at the Southbank Centre. In 2025, she toured the US with Mereba and appeared at SXSW London.

From a young age, anaiis was drawn to voice as a vessel for feeling, inspired by artists like Ella Fitzgerald, whose singing she likened to a nightingale, “a singer of infinite song,” speaking in a recent New York Times article. This early fascination grew into a broader creative lineage through the sacred work of Black thinkers and artists, not as echoes but as foundations that allowed her to explore her own voice. Nina Simone who cut through silence with urgent truth. Maya Angelou and James Baldwin who wrote from the depths of the soul’s undercurrents. Alice Walker’s spirited storytelling. Filmmakers like Ousmane Sembène who capture the nuances of resistance and identity.

These influences shaped anaiis’ approach to creating with conviction, imagining with freedom and honouring curiosity as a compass. anaiis’ visual accompaniments to her music have long been an essential extension of her storytelling. Working closely with her partner Tayo Rapoport and detail-oriented collaborators like Ronan McKenzie, she builds out worlds through film to uncover an artform that invites us to sit between something that feels both fantastical and grounded all at once.

Devotion & The Black Divine is soothing and spine-chilling at once, imbued with key messages of self-love. Rather than being defined by the past, anaiis moves towards something less contained and more aglow with possibility. Her voice stretches beyond its known range to seek out new qualities. On her new album, she speaks more about gratitude and acceptance than worry. An ongoing research on curbing the ego and the weight of fear. She captures the non-linear nature of healing and makes it feel beautiful through her tender lens.

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