“Receiving. It’s always receiving,” says when asked whether making music feels like reaching for something or receiving it. It’s the kind of question that makes more sense if you’ve already spent time inside Alewya’s music. There is a looseness to her songs, but not a lack of shape. A bassline will sit heavy in the chest, then her voice will slip across it, before drums open the room out. The music is physical before anything else; you feel it in the shoulders, the floor, the throat.

I first found Alewya through ‘’, her song with Moses Boyd, and it made immediate sense to hear her against drums that . She never sounds like a singer placed gently on top of a track, but another moving part inside it, another rhythm. When she talks about Boyd, she remembers the first time she saw him play: “He closed his eyes, did this drum solo, and the drums sounded like rain.”

It makes sense why they worked so well together, because is an apt describer for the music around Alewya. Rhythm in percussion in weather in force; a thousand small impacts becoming one feeling. “I have a good relationship with drummers,” she continues. “I think it’s because I’m African. I think we’re just people of rhythm. It’s something that feels inherent.”

That sense of rhythm and momentum courses through ‘’, her debut album. The record has the body in it, but also the space. It can be thick, wet, bass-led, almost gloopy in places, then suddenly lighter, all silver edges and afterglow. The tracks move with the tangly freedom of jazz and the upwards drive of club music but there’s something distinctly painterly also. Alewya has called herself a painter who makes music, and you can hear that in the way ‘Zero’ moves. It’s not cleanly decorative; it’s tactile, it has grain. To her, the spiritual and the physical are never opposites.

The title came to Alewya on the Tube. She had been watching a podcast with the mathematician Robert Grant, who was talking about numbers, specifically zero, and it reminded her of a book she had bought aged 19, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. “I used to love maths when I was in school,” she says. “That was my subject.” The book traced the history of zero, “how it basically came from India, then travelled through to the Middle East and the Arabian world.” When it reached the West, she says, “it caused absolute chaos ’cause the West didn’t have the kind of value for nothing yet.” That phrase, “the value for nothing,” captures how the album was made. Alewya found the book, took it with her, and read one of its opening lines: “Zero is infinity’s twin.”

“When I read that, at the point that I was at with the album, I felt like I was there,” she explains. “By the time I got to the studio, I was like, ‘Yeah, I know what the album’s called. It’s ‘Zero’.” By then, the record had already been reworked over and over. “I finished this album four times over the course of three years,” she says. “I felt like I didn’t know what was gonna be made. I had no control over this. As much as I wanted to try and fool myself into thinking that I should know what this is gonna be, I just didn’t and it was causing me a headache.”

That’s what you hear on ‘Zero’: surrender. The album feels like it was made by someone trying to preserve the first feeling of a song rather than override its existence. “That was the lesson I had to learn,” she explains. “You cannot control this. No one can. You have to just surrender and let it take the time it’s gonna take. Let the songs come as they’re gonna come. Sing the way you need to sing. Leave it. Don’t fiddle too much with stuff.”

The studio, for her, starts with this playfulness. “I’m not thinking,” she says. “I’m just listening. And I’m playing. I’m actually like a kid in the studio. We crack jokes. We’re laughing. We break bread.” A song might begin with “movement” or “rhythm”, or “a little vocal”. “There’s no set process that’s formed yet,” she continues. That looseness depends on trust. Alewya has worked with the same small circle from the beginning: Craigie Dodds, Dean Barrett, Shy FX, Busy Twist, Boddhi Satva. “That’s the crux of the people,” she says, “which I think is beautiful ’cause you’re safe.” Safe does not mean bland. It means a shared history. “We’ve gone through ups and downs; we’ve argued, fought, separated.”

Faith comes up often, but Alewya talks about it without making it vague. When I ask how she knows she’s on the right path, she says, “You don’t know. You’ll never know that, that’s the whole point of faith. That’s what faith is to me.” She comes from “a family of faith” and “a heritage of faith,” from both her Egyptian and Ethiopian sides. In Ethiopia, she says, faith reaches back to the fourth century, “untainted, untouched, ancient.” The best songs, she says, come from love or devotion. “Sometimes they cross in meaning.”

That crossing is all over ‘Zero’: drums and voice, club and prayer, London and inheritance, instinct and craft. Alewya is careful to keep the spiritual grounded. “I’m very much here in everyday life,” she says. “I’m present. I’m not levitating in the mountains somewhere.” That sense of rootedness is present in “the way I cook, the way I walk, the way I dance, the way I show up for my friends, the way I show up for my partner.”

“I live in London,” she says. “I live in, essentially, what we call Babylon.” Aware of how the world can press in, she knows the music has to be protected from that noise. “I’m in the music . My goal is not to avoid it but to just to remain in my creativity.” The early stage “doesn’t need eyes. It doesn’t need noise. It doesn’t actually need any interaction with anything outside of the little world that it’s in.” 

And that can be a consuming, safe space, where the bubble of creation becomes something pure and untouched by the outside. But now that ‘Zero’ is ready to leave her, Alewya is at peace. “I’m genuinely so excited to just be relieved of the project. I’m already in new territory, making other projects. So I’m really excited to let go.” And that’s maybe the final act of surrender for ‘Zero’, allowing the record to leave before it starts to harden in her hands. The album has come through listening, play, faith, trust, movement. Now it gets to move outward, into other rooms, other bodies. 

As seen in CLASH 134. ‘Zero’ is out now.

Alewya wears dress by SUSAMUSA; skirt by Callon; shoes by Marsèll; rings by Annabel B; Earrings by Freya Douglas Ferguson, TYGER & MARIA BLACK.