Natanya

How’s it going? I’m all good. I woke up not too long ago. Excited to get out there but I’m pretty sad it’s not sunny today.

It was brilliant, and then we’ve had it all taken away.

I can’t go without doing it. If I don’t do this, I can’t leave the house — it’s my identity right now.

Great question. Customising my avatar has been cool. I was working for so long and the clothes were there, but I wasn’t taking complete pleasure and joy. I was putting them on and getting a job done but recently I’ve been going out and shopping, that’s been fun. I’ve also been loving Love Story on FX. That has been interesting as hell right now, it’s crazy.

Amy Winehouse is a big one. I love everything about her but the way she took the rockabilly look and made it something of her own, I completely admire. I would say Janet Jackson as well. I love old Kings and Queens movies like Marie Antoinette and a lot of the characters in Tim Burton films.

There's something coming and I kind of had to use New York to finish it off so, I was taking a break, but I was also kind of grinding and I'm excited for everyone to hear it.

The biggest thing I learned last year from doing all these support gigs was tenacity. There's a real art to battling through everything that you need to do to get the show going as a support act, still coming out there, giving it your best and being so excited to charm a crowd of people that might not know you. I was really lucky that a lot of people, by the time I got to Ravyn Lenae, were felines. It just teaches you a lot of strength. 

Personally, I find it intense. Nowadays I don't really read or watch social media. I have a scroll through Twitter (X) to stop myself from being out the loop, but I try as hard as possible to entertain my brain with other things. However, I am a social media baby. I grew up on Instagram and have my first online friends there so, that is so much a part of the way I see the world and how I relate to it. I love the fact that I found this group of people that seem to be so obsessed with me on apps that I have grown up enjoying watching other people on it. My heart says to bring some of the outside world into social media rather than be a part of the ecosystem.

Beautiful. When a lot of these cosigns happened, I was really going about my everyday life. Each one happened at a very random moment like when I was about to go out for dinner or when I was coming home from a show and I really loved. I'm away with the fairies bringing my discoveries onto my app and sharing these videos; then people that I look up to are taking the time out of their day to acknowledge them and show them to their fans. Each one has been more emotional than the last.
I definitely think that there's something in the water because it showed me that there was something so special beyond Feline’s Return that was happening. I'm sure these people see a million artists a day but for them to pick me out of the lot is so meaningful and I know my fans feel it hundred times more than even I do because they love these people too.

Of course, because this to me is a very emotional job. I make music because I want to see people be excited, be inspired, see people cry and tremble like that is my kryptonite. So, the more people are interested, you wonder what the next step I'm going to take is. You're not going to resonate with everyone but at the same time I've always had a very strong sense of myself, and I can't not listen to my gut. I have to back my decisions and as much pressure as I feel, I also feel excited to expose everybody to something new, to widen their palettes. I can't wait for people to hear what is new because it will blow them away.

January 1st 2026, when ‘On ur Time’ came out.  Before that point I was doing my own thing, we were doing all these shows and it was big and lovely, but On Ur Time was a moment for me, my fans and whoever else would become my fan. I felt the energy from them and they felt it from me. I remember putting my phone down and going to my family's New Year's Day party and forgetting that I'd ever posted it, then I woke up the next day and didn't realise how serious it was. I recently also went to Warwick University and seeing everyone in real life and them singing along to the songs, I realised that it was bigger than itself in a very symbolic way too.

No, they didn't know. I had too much fear I didn't want to tell them. I have ADHD so I got a lot of extensions, but they'd always talk to me and tell me there was no point in getting extensions because it was just an extra week for me to finish the work but me treating it as the real deadline was the problem. I couldn't tell them I was going to the studio, but I don't know if they know now. I hope they do, so that my behaviour looks justified now (laughs). I worked really hard to try and look as inconspicuous as possible. I would write essays overnight sometimes; I didn't want to miss out on that experience either and I wanted to get a good grade.

It was actually on Giovanni's Room and a book called Smoke, Lilies and Jade. It was about the body and homophobia but on a bigger level than that like the body and self-image and how the way you describe your body, other people's bodies, the bodies around, the world, the streets and city is so impacted by the way you see yourself or the way you see somebody else. I think it was just like the way that our projection bleeds out into the world around us.

It's something completely different. Everything that people loved about Feline’s Return is so special to me and I've kind of gone away and turned it on its head. It's still got Natanya in it, but I've approached it differently. I'm executive producing this time working with Oscar Scheller and he recently did the Stateside remix and the Lily Allen album, so he's a great mind and I'm very interested to see how everyone reacts to it.  I do have a gut feeling that everyone will be obsessed with it by the time it's out.

Yes, it's on a synth though. We were just playing around with the sounds and then I came across this Latin choral vocoder vibe. And the words are really special because they mean “the sun always shines” and I think that's a really cool way to begin a song that I've written about new beginnings, love and the hope for romance.

Yes, it's me after being dogged out by the world and having so many negative experiences and meeting someone that is really cool but not quite knowing or trusting that if I go through with this that it's going to be a fun experience. It's me saying to him, before we take this any further you got to prove that you are different because I think this is supposed to be a different era of my life so, validate that.

Oh my god! Hell yeah! My mother (laughs). I love all of her music, I really do feel like Kali was a big influence as well when I was a teenager. I was in love with a lot of Madonna too, it reminded me of that as well and it is kind of New York in the sound, I just wanted to get that energy.

I’m a Rihanna fan, that’s what I can say about that.

Yeah, like when I was making Feline’s Return I was so stressed. The rent was due, they put the eviction notice up, they're banging on the door as I'm recording the vocals. I was scared and you can hear it because it's very rigid. I love it because it's so creative, you can feel this girl trying to come out and put her weird ideas on paper but the way I executed them was definitely tense stuff, you feel it. These new songs have that same perfection and precision but it's a victory lap. It’s someone who is just having so much fun they know that they're doing a good job and they're just excited to try again.

For some weird reason, I really want to work with Addison Rae. I know one day when PinkPantheress and I make a song it's going to be incredible. Zara Larsson is also great but on a legendary focus I would love to make a song with Hayley Williams, I think she's so cool. With a lot of the people that I look up to, they're old or they're not alive — I would have loved to go and sing for Prince. I would have loved to have Michael Jackson be really kind and do some backup vocals on my song like when he did that for Brandi. Amy as well, she's not here and that's kind of the Natanya Achilles heel, that a lot of the people I look up to just aren't with us now.

I would say flamboyant is one, flirtatious like you said, and I also think it's full of attitude.

It was London, LA and New York and the bulk of it has actually been in London, but I think New York was a cultural palette cleanser.

I wouldn’t have made this tape if I didn't go to New York because being able to experience a city that vast and that has so much going on without the stress of the UK, changed a lot. It opened me up and made me feel less afraid of experimenting because there's so much possibility in it. New York was very responsible for how this all sounds and coming back to London gave me a lot of pride in what I was doing and allowed me to believe in my own myth.

Obviously when I wrote Jezebel my dad wasn't happy with that, but I think there's something really cool about the juxtaposition between a church upbringing and everything else that you experience when you go out into the world. That's why I think a lot of the greatest musicians ever have all had this thing of I was raised in church and that was my whole life and I'm kind of flirting with the other side now and I feel guilty, but I want to keep going.
I think that tension makes incredible art because church teaches you so much discipline. It teaches you reverence for things bigger than yourself; it teaches you romance, and something that you don't get when you're not religious is the romance of life. It's hard for me to believe I can fix things with a prayer, but my parents do, and I think that's so fucking cool so, those things coming together allow you to approach music in a different way. People that don't have that, they're a lot more calculated with it and they don't buy into the myth as much and that's so important when you want to inspire people. You got to escape yourself first before you give people escapism.

That sounded like one of those obscure RuPaul tweets from 2011.

Recently I have been rocking with the Cocteau Twins Pearly-Dewdrop’s Drops, Bluebeard and then a couple of Kate Bush songs like The Man with the Child in His Eyes and The Morning Fog those are tea like, listen to those in this weather right now just to feel a bit better. I look up to her so much because we've got different backgrounds, but I genuinely do believe she was one of the first. She is a woman, self-produced, really weird, really creative and without her we wouldn't have so many people.

Myself. I've had so many disagreements with people because of the aux. People have tried to grab my phone off me and stuff like that like. 

Yeah, but they always love me. You know when Water was a hit in South Africa, and no one knew about it on this side of the world? I was there and I was the only person streaming Water. I felt like Chicken Little. I remember showing it to people playing it into their ears and I went to Manchester to visit my friend in uni and the DJ was playing and I asked for it I said, “I promise you, download it from YouTube right now it will set this party on fire” and he downloaded it and everyone was like what is this song it's incredible.

Candyland by Natanya. 

Learning how to be the best version of myself that I can possibly be. This is my time now to invest in the future, and I'm really excited to learn more and make more mistakes and get better because of them. This is my chance because I know by next year it won't be there so I can't wait to learn things now and become a better singer, dancer, writer, producer, human being, sister and girlfriend inshallah. With this cold I need to learn now before my brain literally freezes.