This rapper and producer from Cardiff has developed into one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Welsh music; her 2020 album Care City earned her an award to match. Now, Deyah is back with Black Glamour, a mixtape that’s as full of beauty, ferocity and fire as she says. Emma Way quizzed her about it.

What do you want people to take from Black Glamour? 

I think it’s a reminder that we’re all on some kind of journey, that we all have stuff that we’re dealing with, but that there’s redemption at the end of the journey if we allow it to take place.

I saw you support Little Simz earlier this year at the BBC 6 Music festival. How far were you into writing Black Glamour at that time?

It’s funny because I finished writing Black Glamour two days before that. But then I went away for three weeks or so, and when I came back my manager called me and said he’s listened to the whole project and he thinks that there needs to be more tracks. He asked me if I wanted to produce and write them myself, so I ended up then spending, I guess, most of May, June and July writing extra tracks and adding them on there. So all the interludes are the ones that I wrote after the festival.

Speaking of the interludes, they all have ‘her’ in their title somewhere – which is a nice touch, and they kind of break up the mixtape as well. What do they bring to the release?

So as well as ‘her’, they’ve got the elements: fire, air, earth and water. I’ve been doing a lot of travelling recently, and I’ve somehow ended up in really extreme weather conditions – really hot, really cold – or I’ve been in the sea and it’s crazy choppy, or there’s been a storm. Just being in those climates and environments made me realise the power of elements, and that I can relate: the anger of a storm; the calmness of the water… but then the water can get choppy.

Then I started to look at what it means to be a woman and I think my mum, as a woman, is someone I really look up to, which I hadn’t really when I was younger. But as I’ve reflected on all the things she’s done, I think wow, we’re a whole different type of species out here. I didn’t really give myself enough credit for what it is to be a woman, even just down to the stereotypical things of mood swings and what we go through on a monthly basis. I tried to connect the power of women and the ups and downs in nature together.

Did you also try to bring these themes into the production? I hear quite a lot of dark moments and almost metallic textures. How did you go about making those choices?

Yeah, 100% I did. The idea, before the lyrics, was that when we had the element, we wrote the element down. And then I would create something based on the element and then right afterwards, so the instrumental or the beat came first. For example, I think in (fiyHER) there’s an African kind of vibe. It’s one minute [long], but the vibe’s very dancey and sort of flickery; it reminded me of my family in Nigeria dancing around fire, and the beauty of a fire – but also the ferociousness of fire as well. So there was definitely, within the beat, a link to the elements. More so I think than the lyrics.

In Into The Wild, you reference being amongst a bunch of animals. Is this a reference to the music industry?

Actually, yeah. It’s funny, because the deeper I got into the industry – the more meetings with labels, the more serious I guess it became – the more I realised how savage it is. I think when you’re younger or when you’re in that naive stage of music, it’s a hobby and you enjoy it. You don’t really have to get too involved with the business side. You think, this is great, this is amazing, and then as you get closer, it’s like oh my gosh, is this really what goes on in the industry? Wow. So yeah, that was definitely the link.

What was the biggest difference you’ve seen between Care City and Black Glamour?

If I’m honest, Care City was definitely more widely accepted by the audience, but less accepted by the industry. Black Glamour has been less accepted by the audience but more accepted by the industry.

When I released Care City, I kind of knew that it would be a very personal thing, so people would get it, but I knew industry-wise it wasn’t anything that would move. It would just be another project that had a conscious rapper rapping on lo-fi beats. I mean, there’s nothing exciting about it, per se, but the lyrics were very, very deep; whereas with Black Glamour, I couldn’t really see it getting radio play, because it’s extremely dark. I couldn’t see people sitting down and just taking it in. But on a business level, it’s opened up crazy doors in terms of sync deals, film deals, and labels looking at me more as an overall artist, as opposed to a rapper that just raps on beats I’m given.

Do you have any plans to play these live in the near future?

Yeah 100%, definitely. I think I’m going to be careful with which ones I perform. But yeah, definitely. At Radio One’s Big Weekend on May 28, I performed Suffa and Maranatha and it was really cool to see the response – specifically to Maranatha, because it’s quite a deep song. Not everyone’s at a festival for depth, so it was quite cool to see how people responded. Moving forward, I’ll probably perform those, but more so my newer stuff, because Black Glamour was more of a moment for myself. I didn’t really do it to get anywhere – I just needed to get it out of my system.

So have you been writing since then? What have you found you’re moving towards now?

Musically? I think I’m in a different place. Back then I was in and out of hospital with overdoses and rehab, because I started writing this at the end of last year. I was in such a dark place. It was horrible. Since then, I’ve gotten married and  just become more settled.

I just never thought I’d be a settled person: I really thought I’d be that 60-year-old in Las Vegas still doing drugs, walking around on my own. I’ve just become more settled in myself, and learned the value of being a steady person. So I think moving forward, the music is going to be more wholesome, and it’s going to have an element of joy. I don’t think I could say any of my songs in the past have had much joy. So there’ll definitely be joy, and lighter melodies, as opposed to feeling like the world is on top of me.

Black Glamour is out now. Info: linktr.ee/deyahofficial

words EMMA WAY