NJWA

It all started with a shade of black, and then there was no turning back. A multiple award winning singer-songwriter, New York based Najwa is returning from her three year hiatus with a darker undertone in her music, experimenting with somber and minimalistic echoes over the usual warm piano accompaniments. Thus the Aurora EP is born- her sounds shamelessly stripped down into a bare electronic setting, her soul’s deepest shadows unveiled.

Perhaps it was the barren winters of Boston, having spent the last three years pursuing her music degree at Berklee College of Music. Switching her playlist from Jill Scott, Erykah Badu and Billie Holiday to the likes of Little Dragon and James Blake while braving the isolated icy paths far away from home may have had a little something to do with it. A drastic departure from her debut R&B/neo-soul album Innocent Soul back in 2011, Aurora seeks to reaffirm her Malaysian roots by blending traditional elements from her heritage with a more current soundtrack. Najwa’s first single off Aurora, “Seri Mersing”, boldly weaves the ancestral ghazal folk song into a contemporary orchestration- intimating a sacrilegious cultural intercross of the old and new.