Acclaimed GRAMMY-nominated East African singer/songwriter Somi officially announced her highly anticipated new album What Does It Take to Bloom? due to release on 7 August on Salon Africana. Marking the beginning of this exciting new chapter, she has also dropped the project’s first single, ‘We’re All Falling’.
A multi-award-winning Rwandan-Ugandan artist, she most recently graced the stage at the Sanfoka Festival alongside Thandiswa and Msaki. With a career spanning international acclaim and a strong presence in South Africa, she has established herself as a respected and familiar figure within the country’s music landscape.
Her upcoming album is her first collection of original songs in six years, is an exploration into the ongoing process of staying faithful to oneself amid life’s dissonance. Written and recorded between Dakar, Lagos, Paris and New York City, the album weaves global sensibilities into an intimate meditation on uncertainty and change — asking whether growth is something we recognize as it’s happening, or once we’ve already been transformed.
‘We’re All Falling’ the first single on the album, one of the project’s most affecting songs, confronts mortality with striking clarity. Written during a season of personal loss, the song reflects on the sobering awareness that life is fragile and time is finite. Yet it is not consumed by despair. It becomes a call for grace and an invitation to live in the moment.
When asked about the album, she said “I wrote this body of work while traversing many places and losing many people. This album is a mirror of searching for where and how to take root in spite of that. I pray these songs offer each listener a sense of Home or, at the very least, a witnessing of me coming Home to myself.”
For Somi, every album is an act of place-making. Her catalog reads like a map of migration and memory – traversing the cultural bridge between Africa and America with records rooted in Nigeria, in Harlem, in the spirit and political inheritance of Miriam Makeba. On Somi’s forthcoming album, the terrain shifts. This time, the place being mapped is not a city, country, or collective memory. It’s the self.
Listen to “We’re All Falling”
Having spent years navigating the global jazz scene while also feeling adjacent to it, Somi defies categorization – embracing a hybrid of jazz, soul, highlife, spoken word, and her African heritage. What Does It Take to Bloom? marks an evolution of Somi’s sound, and finds her taking greater vocal risks while trusting her instincts more deeply. Abandoning the need to fit inside any artistic box, that refusal in itself is a form of blooming.
Ultimately, the album is grounded in finding belonging – recognizing that the journey towards wholeness is rarely linear and always unfinished. From the many experiences in life beyond our control to the embodied realities of womanhood, Somi explores the many facets of self-discovery that make her bloom. She hopes listeners will find themselves within the music; and if not, she offers the chance to witness her coming home to herself.
