"I guess it's sort of… Paul Simon, but in a sweaty, African dancehall club." That's how southeast London-based musician Rina Mushonga describes her new single, "Jungles", which we're premiering below. It's also about as close as she's willing to get to categorising her own sound.Born in India, raised in Zimbabwe and now based in Peckham (after spending her university years in the Netherlands), Mushonga has never been happy to confine herself to a single identity. It's an ethos her music wears on its sleeve, with its skidding synths, buoyant indie melodies and Afropop beats – a combination she's "trying to do in a way that isn't cliché, and doesn't play into these tired stereotypes of what African music is supposed to sound like." What are those stereotypes? "That it stands on its own. The idea people have of people sitting in huts and playing mbiras or marimbas, that's obviously a part of its musical history, but what's being played in clubs in cities throughout Africa is such a different vibe."
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Today, we're in a café in Shoreditch. She texted beforehand asking if I could pick the place – she doesn't really go to east London. She prefers to stick to Peckham, a place with an "inspiring, international vibe. People from all over the world are walking around. I feel very at home, probably also because it's so transient. It's the kind of place where anyone can feel at home for a while, and then you go onto the next place. It really suits me. For now."It suits her more than Amsterdam did at least. She lived there for a few years, after leaving Zimbabwe because of the "limited scope" of opportunities for young artists there, only to find the Netherlands also pretty constrictive, but in a different way. "I found the Dutch music scene, after a while, to be very homogenous, and quite white. It just didn't inspire me enough for the next steps I wanted to take." She released a debut album, 2014's atmospheric, folk-inflected The Wild, The Wilderness, but she didn't feel that she was tapping into the depths of her potential.
With her new album – which she previewed first with the brilliant "Atalanta", and now with "Jungles" (above), a twitchy, coming-of-age synth jam, a tale of youthful restlessness with a drum beat you can't quite get a hold of – she came to embrace the parts of herself she'd been keeping tucked away. "I shied away from putting, for lack of a better word, African influences in my music for the longest time. Because people, without having heard my music, would be like, 'Oh you should play at world music festivals. Because you're a Zimbabwean, that's where you belong.' So it took me a long time to get to a point where I felt comfortable enough in my own identity to really start embracing that part of my musical heritage, and to try to explore that and experiment with it more. It's important that you've got women of colour who are breaking the stereotypes about the kind of music that we're supposed to make."
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As well as becoming "a lot more electronic, and very, very synth driven" (with the help of Grammy-winning producer Brett Shaw), Mushonga's music also started embracing themes of metamorphosis and empowerment. There's a sort of pre-emptive nostalgia in there too. "When we're old and restless, we'll wish we were young," she sings on "Jungles". I ask Mushonga about the lyric as she's taking a sip of cappuccino, and she puts the cup down with a smile. "I hate explaining lyrics, because it's kind of like telling someone about your dream, or when you got high. But I know I tend to write quite abstractly. My manager asked me to write down my lyrics earlier, and when you see them written down they always look…" Different? I suggest, just as she finishes the sentence with, "Shit." She laughs. "No yeah, 'different' is good!"Mushonga might not want to dissect her lyrics, but she knows where the recurring themes come from. "I write so much about transformation," she says, "because that's exactly how I was experiencing making music. I finally feel like it's getting to a point where I'm not choosing between how I'm supposed be and how I want to be. I've really taken the room to be thoughtful and purposeful with my music – but also playful.""Maybe there are clichés in there now, maybe I'm playing around with that more… I just sort of give less of a fuck what people think about it."You can follow Alexandra on Twitter