Seinabo Sey has the sort of voice that transports you to an ethereal plane. She possesses a rich timbre that is deep, honest and distinct. The Swedish-Gambian singer-songwriter has been aware she had a gift from her childhood where she would write songs from the age of ten or burst into song and notice the room would fall silent ("kids looked at me like something weird was happening"). Having soaked up her mother’s musical tastes, and observing her father Maudo Sey, a renowned West African sufi musician whose hymn-singing would bounce around the walls of her familial home, she’s carved her own path since.

Sey is the proud owner of four Swedish Grammy’s. Her first taste of success came via her hit single, 'Younger', which was later remixed by Kygo, attracting international attention. It was 2015 and her first studio album Pretend established her as an artist to watch, with the versatility to flip between pop and soul, tying together sonic worlds with her unwavering vocal range. She won a Swedish Grammy award for Best Newcomer that year. On her subsequent album, I'm a Dream, Sey's autobiographical lyricism shone through via defiant tracks like 'I Owe You Nothing'. Elsewhere on the record she dove boldly into grief, womanhood, racial identity, and body image, an album that also got her five Grammy nominations and winner of two.

In the beginning of 2020, Sey had just started touring as opening act for Ms. Lauryn Hill when covid-19 struck. Sey spent the pandemic honing in on her craft she explains that her latest EP 'Sweet Life' should ferry the listener to a place of peace. "I wanted to create a world that was like TLC's 'Waterfalls', just a little paradise for Black girls, where everything's okay and nothing is a problem," she explains. "We're all like lounging eating fruits or something." The scene she describes is not dissimilar to the conditions in which she crafted her new EP.

Much of it came to life on a tiny island off the coast of Sweden named Gotland last summer during the pandemic."I cooked food, we went swimming in a lagoon and it was really warm, and it felt like paradise," she says. Combining this tranquillity with the crew's hunger to use the time and space to experiment meant the EP grew. "I just wanted it to feel like a breeze of sorts. It feels like nature to me," she says before adding that they recorded waves, wind and crickets on the trip and mixed it into the tracks.

She says there's a "vibe of friendship" running through this record. The bold cover art is the name of the EP braided into her hair by one of her oldest friends. Meanwhile, she entrusted one of her other best friends Isak to write four demos for the EP, which is a swift departure from her other projects where she has mostly penned the songs.

"There are a million different ways of doing things and I've tried a few, but this is really my way of creating music," she says. "I wanted to do that since I was a kid, I started off with playing in
bands where you always kind of create things together. So that's been a very major difference for me this time around."

With this EP, Sey wanted to challenge herself to get involved in the production of her songs and be her own A&R, pairing creatives together behind the scenes and sharpening her curatorial eye. It challenged her to become more of a leader and learn to implement her own ideas on how to expand her sonic universe. For example, she has been revisiting the reggae music she grew up on, as well as Afrobeats artists like Wizkid and Burna Boy alongside Ashanti and Destiny’s Child. She found the common thread is that each musician makes you nod your head and vibe while you connect with your stories, a feeling she tried to emulate on 'Sweet Life'.

Consequently, she concluded that she wanted to avoid her tracks evoking a feeling of struggle. "There's definitely a way that the society tells you what you're supposed to be like. Sometimes in life that comes naturally and sometimes, it just doesn't. I think this time around I’m tired of explaining painful shit to people," she says. "There's more flow to this album. It's light-hearted. We just wanted to make something that we thought was really beautiful."

Sey explains how 'Sweet Dreams' is lyrically reflective of her mindset. "The tug of war of being in the studio, not seeing your family, finding love and security in your little bubble. Thinking
'maybe I should be better' but realising it's OK," she says. "That's the way it's felt in the last year." To that end 'Sweet Life' is reflective but a little more content than her last release and illustrates not only her progress as an artist but how at peace she is with herself.