With her new track “Chilli Chilli,” Azena invites us into her bedroom-pop dreamscape

“I would spend hours every day in my room writing and creating. It never felt like practising; it was more like a form of connection, introspection, and making sense of the world around me”. This is how Azena, a North London-born-and-bred singer/songwriter, producer and visual artist, describes her initiation into musical world-building. Speaking to me in anticipation of her upcoming track “Chilli Chilli”, the self-visualised artist is resolute in her determination to share her cultivated sound with us.

For Azena, music has long been the water she swims in. Raised in a council flat with her Mum, she grew up with the sounds of Amy Winehouse, Billie Holiday, and Corrine Bailey Rae. A musical autodidact to her core, she tells me that growing up, “paying for instruments and lessons wasn’t realistic”. Undeterred by the unavailability of a conventional path into music, she found her way in through exploration, bathing herself in musical play from an early age. “When I was eight, my grandad passed. I was very close to him, and I wrote my first attempt at rap. It was about death and the impermanence of life," she says. "I was really keeping it light as an eight-year-old." Recognising her daughter's musical fluency, Azena’s Mum bought her a guitar from a charity shop and an old keyboard from a friend. These tools allowed her to connect with music in a manner she describes as being “spiritual”.

What followed was the incremental construction of an intimate surreality. Through performing live, Azena recognised the capacity her music had to make audiences feel understood. In sharing her music with us, she creates a space that is both introspective and collective. The stories she tells are very much her own, but the humanity behind them is a sentiment that belongs to us all.

“Chilli Chilli” is where Azena branches more into experimentation material. Accompanied by a hazy, melancholy video, co-directed by Azena and Max Rollason, the track finds the artist fully at ease with herself, leaning into themes of flirtation, connection and intimacy with a playful confidence. Whilst the musical influences of Winehouse, Holliday and Rae are audible, the sound is uniquely Azena’s. It’s blending of neo-soul, electronic, and R&B musical aesthetics creates a soundscape that’s audibly tethered to the visual world created by the track's music video.

Looking forward, Azena is fixed on being unfixed, telling me “the direction will continue to be intuitive and honest, making music when I feel called to, without restriction. I don’t feel tied to stay within one sound, but the thread through everything will always be writing and the way I use my voice."