Get To Know: Konyikeh

This year has been a year of new beginnings and firsts for 23-year-old British musician Konyikeh. Her first single ‘Sorrow’ was shared earlier in the year, and gradually followed up by other singles before she shared her debut project EP LITANY.

Singing with her deeply soothing and melancholic tone against an intricately composed soundscape, LITANY is enchantingly expressive and moving. Stunning for a first project.

New Wave magazine got the opportunity to speak to the rising musician about her debut EP, her love for music, and the importance of accepting that it’s okay not to be okay and finding comfort in your vulnerability.

Surprisingly not surprising is that this project has been years in the making. The songs were written when Konyikeh was only a teenager, already engaging with deep meaningful topics and themes, the care taken to bring this project alive is expected, after you listen to it for the first time. What isn’t however is the emotional maturity that Konyikeh has carried since secondary school.

“It was good. I was nervous before it dropped”, she shares. “Just because it was my body of work and I was putting it out into the world, but I feel good. Happy that it’s out and people are receiving it.”

“I think at the time when I was writing it was growing mentally taxing on me. It was a lot! That’s when I felt tired, after writing each song."

“I wrote the songs back when I was a teenager, I’m 23 now but I felt very emotionally spent. Especially writing songs like ‘I Cry’ and ‘Girls Like Us’.

“’ Sorrow’ was the first single I literally wrote, so I thought it would be fitting to have it as the first song I put out. I then sort of segwayed into ‘Teenage Dreams’ because I felt I really wanted to represent my teenage years.”

Explaining the reasoning by naming her EP, she says “ I grew up in a Catholic church and litany is a part of the mass. Basically when the priest comes to the congregation and the congregation goes back to the priest. It kind of has this soothing effect. So these songs were like my little prayers.”

And even though the project is quite personal, there are moments when those prayers are extended and reach out to wider communities, with the aim of empowerment and comfortable especially to black girls. “Yeah literally, it’s like talking to a group of girls that look like me, act like me, see like me.”

Comparing it to ‘I Cry’, Konyikeh says “I think songs like ‘I Cry’ is more about soothing society and how a lot of us put our masks on. It’s about how we interact with the world. (it’s about how we are behaving) behind closed doors, (where) a lot of us are actually breaking down.”

The sudden shift in introspectiveness could be the influence of our days in lockdown, as well as the brutal honesty of how we are actually feeling.

“It’s such a good thing, because so many people especially during my teenage years was like I’m okay, I’m good. They really put on this mask when really a lot of stuff was going on.”

Although “It’s not like everyone should be honest. You are entitled to your privacy and you don’t have to declare to the world what is going on in your life but it’s nice to say actually I’m actually not as okay as it seems.”

Speaking about her project Konyikeh describes it as a journey of “self-exploitation”, that resulted in her having to “really sit with my emotions”. Often, she would “talk aloud” to give voice to thoughts and ideas, as well as go to therapy sessions.

Once recreated she felt the need to create some distance, “ I kind of took a break and I kind of recorded it (the EP) after I moved on from that chapter in my life. So it was a lot easier to record the music then."

Classically trained as a multi-instrumentalist, which includes experience in playing the violin and piano, in the orchestra and chamber choir there are subtle advantages that manifest in Koniyeh’s expression.

Refining her musical skills at the prestigious and renowned Guildhall School of Music and Drama in West London, Konyikeh spoke about the benefits of a classical education despite it being “intense”, she said “ I think it really developed my ear more than everything else. I can listen out for really great sounds.”

“When I was playing the violin I had to communicate with emotion purely through sound. So I would have to think of an emotion and convey that through my fingers. The voice is so much easier to convey emotion through.”

Speaking about her influences, “I listen to a lot of music, so not only classical but Jazz, a lot of Afrobeats, Dancehall. So I’ve kind of taken it in and it has shaped my ear. It’s made me a better musician.”

However explaining how she felt being in such predominantly white spaces, she said “Growing up I become so used to it, it became my norm but my normal was quite isolating and alienating you didn’t really have people to relate to. It was a very interesting experience that I had to go through. Looking back I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.

In the creation of the project, Konyikeh worked with executive producer Charlie J Perry, and they spent long nights in the studio building a cinematic world of deep expression.

That world is also manifested in the accompanying visuals of the singles that were released in the run-up to the project being released.

“We tried to create an overarching storyline of this family”, Konyike says. The story was influenced from a variety of sources. The movie doesn’t follow my personal life but it kind of stems from there because it presents the perfect family when really there's a lot really going on beneath the surface."

“I feel like a lot of black families can relate to that. Having to present yourself in a certain way and really a lot of stuff is going on behind the scenes that you really don’t want to talk about in public.”

Coming to the end of the conversation, I can’t help but be curious about what she’s learned from the creative process of making the album. “I learnt that being vulnerable isn’t as scary as people make it out to be. I think it’s still scary but it’s a good thing to be vulnerable. I feel like I was at my most vulnerable in this music and it’s turned into a piece of music that I’m quite proud of.”

Already Konyikeh has experienced the highs of performing live at events like the Brits, when she performed as an opening soloist in 2022 alongside Dave, for his rendition of ‘In The Fire’, taken off of his sophomore album We Are All In This Together.

And now, in the aftermath of her debut project being released, she is in the process of piecing together what her own detailed live experience would sound like, as well as back in the studio releasing new music.

It will be exciting to see the unfolding of her musicality in real-time.

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