Alewya: Being and Nothingness

Alewya’s debut album sees the multidisciplinary artist transform a life lived across cultures, sounds and disciplines into a singular creative world – but ZERO is only the starting point.

At a sold-out show at London venue The Lower Third on a mid-July Monday evening, Crack watches Alewya command an audience that already knows the words to her debut album ZERO, released just a few weeks earlier. A natural performer, she effortlessly directs the lighting technician. “I want it to resemble moonlight,” she says. Her stage presence is further adorned by chalk sketches on several blackboards hanging behind her. “I did them on the day, during soundcheck. It’s quick for me, not tedious. Any chance I get to switch up a space and make it my own, I’ll take it,” she tells me five days later as we sink into a sofa at the studio where she’s just wrapped the photoshoot for her Crack Magazine cover, ahead of schedule. 

Alewya Demisse is at ease. Still ensconced in the whirlwind of album promo, she seems ready for some downtime. In a baggy graphic T-shirt, bandana and hat, her signature neck tattoos peeking out, she’s already relaxed as she opens up about how ZERO came to be and her creative approach to music making. She’s previously referred to herself as a “painter who makes music”, yet speaking to her and watching her work, her approach feels even more expansive, holistic. I ask Alewya (pronounced ah-leh-wee-yah) about the show and how she felt performing her long-gestating debut album after only having played unreleased tracks from it previously. “People were singing the words, they knew the tracks, they were hype,” she tells me. “When Maktoub came on, the ground was shaking.” She describes it as a homecoming: “It felt like people were saying, ‘girl, where have you been?’” 

Two nights before the interview, she had played a version of the same material, billing it as ZERO: Deconstructed, pulling songs apart into their component stems, looping sections and rebuilding tracks from the album. A polymath – she’s also a visual artist with a background in graffiti and animation, as well as sculpture – it’s telling that she preferred performing it like that. “The live version can be totally different to the recorded one,” she says. “In that sense, it’s never really done.” For an album so consumed with the idea of zero as a starting point, an infinity of potential rather than a full-stop or ending, the fact that even the finished record doesn’t stay finished feels less of a contradiction than a true interpretation. 

Ask five outlets what the singer-songwriter’s heritage is, and you’ll get an array of different answers: Ethiopia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, west London. Sometimes these locations are all jumbled together; sometimes they’re only partially ticked off. Alewya clears it up for us. Born in Saudi Arabia to an Egyptian father who was born and raised in Sudan, and an Ethiopian mother, they then moved to London to settle when Alewya was five years old. Here, she found a home within the diasporic communities of west London.  

Despite the intricacies of her family background, Alewya is crystal clear about where ZERO sits on this journey. “I’d say it leans way more into Ethiopia,” she says. It’s there in the Amharic invocations of the opener Simian Mountain, and the maternal connection she credits throughout. Egypt is present, but more atmospheric rather than literal. Cairo FM adds its own gravitational pull to the record, but it’s the Ethiopian material she calls home. 

From that heart, the album moves through a constellation of sounds and reference points, taking in – but not limited to – hip-hop, R&B, dub, jungle, Ethiopian devotional melody and Cairo-adjacent funk. It’s an amalgamation of Alewya’s musical influences obtained through years and locations. Other reference points surface across the tracklist, for instance, the Detroit house homage of Night Drive and the more sparse percussion of City of Symbols, or the spikey DIY pop of Maktoub (a track that has ushered in a slew of M.I.A. comparisons). The lyrics move between English, Amharic and Arabic, reinforcing that the record’s multilingualism is as much a structural feature of the music as it is of Alewya’s life. It certainly has this atmospheric city feel, but is also spaced out enough to invoke the desert.   

The visuals for the single Maktoub were shot in Afar, where three tectonic plates meet – a landscape slowly transforming into an ocean over the next few hundred thousand years. We share our affinity for the desert, and Alewya describes her kinship to Afar’s nomadic communities. “They have very particular spirits,” she says. “Very graceful, but very ‘I will fight.’”

For an album that pulls together a vast palette of influences without any visible seams, ‘curated’ would be an easy description of her sound to reach for. But Alewya disagrees. “It didn’t feel like curation while I was making it,” she says. The blending, she argues, happens only in retrospect, through sequencing. The process itself is instinctive, closer to how a teenager absorbs whatever is in their orbit and starts producing from it. Her own current rotation runs from LCD Soundsystem and Mazzy Star to Pixies, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pink Floyd and Breakage. “A lot of it’s calming music,” she says, “because I’m trying to stay the fuck calm.” A response seemingly to the rigmarole that’s part of an album rollout and the noise that comes with it.

Growing up, Alewya was surrounded by a collision of sounds: Ethiopian music, Quran recitation, her older brother’s diet of The Strokes, Deerhunter and Mount Kimbie, her parallel London-centric education in garage, grime, R&B and hip-hop. All of which accumulated into her own expansive, borderless sound. She started making beats on GarageBand on an iPad as a hobby in her early twenties, and Shy FX, one of London’s drum ’n’ bass and jungle originals, slid into her DMs after she posted one of her productions. “It wasn’t, ‘You could be the biggest artist in the world,’” she says. “It was more like nurturing a talent or a passion, rather than chasing an outcome.” He’s remained in her corner ever since, executive-producing ZERO the same way he shepherded 2021’s Panther In Mode, the debut six-track EP that first announced her Afro-electronic percussion alongside a visual identity so fully formed it made clear, immediately, that music was only one register she worked in.

If there’s a world behind the album, Alewya has already written it… literally. While in Japan, deliberately distant from the cultural context in which she made the record, Alewya built what she calls her creative bible – a deck intended to translate ZERO’s internal logic to her team before any visuals were shot. She calls it the “anatomy of ZERO”, a document she describes as a manifesto. Listening back to the record at a remove, she isolated its five recurring “DNA strands”: roots, deconstruction, space, instinct, and feminine assertion. Deconstruction shows up in the irregular percussion of City of Symbols; space is there in Night Drive, mostly instrumental, its vocals held back and controlled, or the contemplative quality of Simian Mountain. Feminine assertion manifests itself in the title track and Red Clay Luv.

She’s previously described making her own beats as a way to bring her visual ideas to life, and journalists have characterised her visual art as a kind of “hieroglyphic” painting style: stream-of-consciousness works built around recurring motifs of ancestry, feminine power and African imagery. “Art audiences are primed to accept that an artist is searching,” she says. “Music doesn’t get that same grace. You’re expected to be liked, and that stops you looking for possibilities.” She explains that the inspiration for this manifesto came from visual artists rather than musicians. We talk about how it is necessary sometimes to make art that people don’t yet know how to receive.

“After pandemic-mode, I knew I wanted to make a full body of work, but I didn’t realise it would take the process it did,” she says. “It was gradual. At some point, you realise: OK, I’m collecting songs now, I should actually dedicate myself to this.”

Between her 2021 EP Panther In Mode and ZERO, Alewya toured in support of Little Simz and continued to travel, all the while allowing the album to take shape at its own pace. That kind of patience is increasingly rare, and she knows it.  In an industry shaped by algorithms and fast-shifting trends, there’s pressure on artists to keep up, rushing the process. Likewise, complete albums are condensed down to the singles. “It’s the attention economy,” she agrees, lamenting the collective diminishing of attention spans. “But there are still album listeners. It’s just that what’s popular probably isn’t the album. Real music heads still appreciate it.”

Despite ZERO’s sense of wholeness, Alewya insists there was no driving concept behind the writing. “There wasn’t a thought-out narrative or concept, and there was no message I was trying to push,” she says. “I like to work on a completely blank canvas and let whatever happens, happen, with no limitations, no outside opinions. I can’t stand other people’s opinions intruding on my process. It doesn’t have to be deep; if it’s deep, let it be deep – if it’s not, don’t force it. Anything can go, and that’s how you actually see what’s inside of you.”

The studio sessions that coaxed out what was inside were, she says, wildly uneven, unpredictable even – and she would lean into that. “Sometimes it was really intense, sometimes really funny,” she says. “Sometimes we’d go in and make nothing at all, it just wasn’t coming out, and that’s part of the story too. You have to be patient with the process. You can’t put pressure on it; if you do, I’ll cut it off, I won’t do it.” Some days meant leaving the country entirely just to reset.

The album’s lyrics, by contrast, resisted Alewya’s instinct-first method entirely. “Lyrics are probably the hardest part for me, and they’re the last thing to arrive,” she says. “Everything else is so intuitive, but lyrics take it up into your head, and I don’t love that feeling.” Her workaround was to let melody guide her: “Sometimes when I’m singing, sounds come out that sound like words, and I piece them together. I just want the words to be true to the feeling of the song… feeling first.” 

This method of “feeling first” is similar to how some novelists write – channelling emotion before the characters come into focus. Which begs the obvious question: what was she reading during the album’s making? Two books she says stayed with her through the process were the Ethiopian Bible and the foundational work of Taoism, Tao Te Ching, which she would open at random for a line of guidance. It’s a fitting pairing for a record that borrows its philosophical scaffolding from Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, and whose emotional register keeps circling the same idea, that nothingness and fullness might not be opposites at all.

Asked what comes next, Alewya turns almost monastic. More touring, more deconstructed live sets to expand the world of ZERO. Beyond that, she desires space. “I like to wipe it all away, clean the house,” she says, “and only bring the next thing in when it’s actually time.” It’s refreshing to hear someone who isn’t precious about the afterlife of their latest creation. “It might just be one and done. It might go downhill from here, in a good way.” She felt, she says, next to nothing on release day. She was cutting up fruit, half-expecting some wave of catharsis, yet it never came. Instead, it arrived when she performed the project to rooms full of people, which may be the only metric she actually trusts.