Staff Reviews

Denai Moore - We Used to Bloom

Review by Francesca D'Arcy-Orga

A confident, naive, sensitive journey»

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23-year-old Jamaican born, London raised artist Denai Moore releases her highly anticipated sophomore album We Used To Bloom. Produced by Steph Marziano, the album is released via Because Music. Moore was only a teenager when her music career began — plucked from an early open mic night, the exquisite shape and timbre of her voice met immediate adoration: her first single, Blame, played across Radio 1, 2 and 6Music, and her debut EP brought a stunning appearance on Jools Holland. Her peers were desperate to collaborate. Her debut album, Elsewhere, was rapturously acclaimed. The last couple of years have provided an intense and sometimes painful period of growth for Moore — an experience that she documents now with unflinching openness on We Used to Bloom. These 10 songs reveal a young woman figuring out the world and her place in it, while also charting Moore’s evolving relationship with herself — with self-esteem, self-image and the crippling anxiety she once suffered and is now challenging head on through her songwriting. What is particularly notable about Moore’s music — in her early EPs and collaborations, on Elsewhere, and now in We Used to Bloom - is how it defies genre. There are R’n’B influences, certainly, but alongside them stand a love for folk and soul, for Bon Iver, Feist and Solange, for Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz into the “richness” of Beyonce’s Lemonade, for the fact that “Kanye never made the same record twice”, for the way that St Vincent “really reinvented the idea of being a lead guitarist.” And there too is the girl who learned to play keys alongside her session musician father, the girl who took up guitar and sang at a young age, who spent her childhood in Jamaica listening to the gospel music of the local churches. “And melodically that still influences me,” she says. “It’s a very resonant music. It stays.” And so to bracket Moore with any one particular scene seems naive —such defiance of genre is crucial for a flourishing British music community.
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