iKeda brings her ‘bubble riddim’ universe to life on “Go!”

“Go!” is iKeda’s response to the people who think they have her figured out. “‘Go!’ was made at a time that I felt under attack from a few haters who built this idea in their heads of who I was,” she explains. “The song is me deflecting that and not letting it get to me by reminding myself of who I am.” And at least she got a brilliant song out of it. On “Go!”, dancehall meets distorted electropop, garage and UK club music, in a combination iKeda refers to as “bubble riddim”. For a song prompted by a few haters, she sounds remarkably unbothered.

“I often feel like when you live life impulsively or take risks, you are punished for it sooner or later,” she says. “‘Go!’ is playful resilience in a sing-song taunt, and I feel like it has turned into a sort of mantra for others too.”

The track is the first proper introduction to Bangs N Braces, iKeda’s forthcoming second EP, which lands on 28th August. For all the spontaneity in her music, she spends a fair amount of time doing her homework. “I spend a lot of time studying music and finding new corners of inspiration that I’d like to explore,” she explains. “Melodies tend to come quite naturally to me, so a song has already started to build as soon as I hear a beat.”

Music, however, came later in life for iKeda. A Central Saint Martins graduate, she began as a painter, albeit a fairly restless one. “I always felt this overwhelming urge to make sculptures, installations and performance pieces,” she says. “I wanted to create something more physical than a two-dimensional image, because I was always trying to build a whole world, not just a single picture.”

Music gave her more room to do exactly that, with songwriting, melodies, music videos and live performance each adding another dimension. It also offered an escape from the solitude of painting. “It opened the door to collaboration, which was something I’d always craved,” she says.

Most of iKeda’s close collaborators are friends she either knew before she began making music or met during her earliest experiments as a musician. “There’s so much power in community building for me,” she says. “I do think that nowadays, people crave seeing the social context of creation.”

It would be easy to package iKeda, Babymorocco, Tailtiu and Erika Kamano as a single emerging London movement. But iKeda is far more interested in the peculiarities that keep their individual worlds distinct: Babymorocco’s fascination with historical illnesses and mythology, Erika’s gymnastics and taekwondo, or Tailtiu’s penchant for rock climbing and headstands. Not exactly the foundations of your average creative movement, sure, but far more interesting for it. “Each one of our worlds just so happens to harmonise with and complement each other whilst still having our own individuality,” she says. “It’s very rare, but it does happen.”

Supporting PinkPantheress across the UK and Europe this spring revealed how far beyond that circle iKeda’s music could travel. “After performing at so many club nights with people that already understand the music or sound, it made me realise I want more people outside of those scenes to know my music,” she says, “because I think it really can exist outside of that and thrive.”

iKeda’s fascination with surrealist and lowbrow art runs throughout Bangs N Braces, where the familiar is rarely quite what it seems. If someone could step inside it, she imagines pyramids of pink sand and sparkling gold between overgrown playgrounds; origami birds made from Tube maps; neon tigers; and “echoes of steel drums and whispers of affirmations”. It’s oddly surreal, oddly specific, and yet unmistakably iKeda. If people thought they already had her figured out, then Bangs N Braces should prove otherwise.