LATASHÁ brings house, heavy 808s and Jersey Club into OUT HERE, her first full-length album since 2017’s Teen Nite at Empire.
The nine-track project connects her Brooklyn rap foundations with the questions of ownership and self-direction that have formed her work in creative technology.
The album is all about TASHI, a higher consciousness alter ego via which LATASHÁ is able to explore exhaustion, vulnerability and the potential for change. There’s an opening track which is just her crying and asking for the strength to go on. The conversation that follows provides that emotional anchor with a structure, TASHI being the part of her that can see a path forward.
LATASHÁ describes the process as…
Taking the step in defining my personal alchemy through experiments with sound, lyric, collaboration and selves.
That experimentation carries into the production. WAVE pairs boom-bap drums with electronic soul, tracing the shift from burnout towards renewed creative momentum. PPNE moves between hypnotic house and 808-driven hip-hop, while “CHAOS” pushes rap into uptempo electronica.
Elsewhere, LOVE COME FIND ME approaches vulnerability through electro-R&B and melodic hip-hop. MORE OUTTA LIFE draws on dancehall and club rhythms, and BLSSD channels thankfulness and ancestral protection through Jersey Club. A club remix of WHO I AM revisits the single previously featured in Netflix’s Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker.
The emphasis on creative autonomy has a very real history. In addition to her recording work she tokenised music videos on Zora and subsequently became Head of Community Programming there. She also founded TOPIA which is an educational and community initiative for underrepresented creators as they go about navigating Web3 and alternative models of ownership.
On OUT HERE those issues become very personal indeed: who owns the work, how do you go about sustaining it and what happens when the work starts to be dictated by exhaustion? The closing track ALCHEMIST brings the album’s electronic and rap elements together around the very real possibility of making something useful out of that pressure.