Three years since the release of her critically acclaimed debut album Amazulu, Amanda Black returns with her second full-length project. The 18-track album is titled Power, and kicks off with a fitting spoken word piece by Kush Mahleka.
“In the intro,” Amanda Black told Apple Music in the album’s liner notes, “there’s the line ‘The rise of any phoenix is a revolution waiting to be set alight.’ When Kush read that to me I was like ‘That! That is exactly what I wanted’. It literally encapsulated what I wanted to portray in the whole album—it’s the thread that goes through each and every song. When I made the chorus for “Power”, that’s when I decided what I wanted to call the album, because it best describes my journey.”
The music is on Power is big, as it provides both electronic sounds and actual instruments. It will sound even bigger when interpreted by a band live.
Power sounds both mature and youthful, and Amanda’s voice still fills up your headphones, and her songwriting is sharper and even more personal than on Amazulu.
“I wanted to get back the power I felt was taken from me,” she says, “so for me the album was a healing process. There are songs where I was able to say what I hadn’t been able to during the past few years. Each and every song was a moment for me because there’s so much I hadn’t said and dealt with—to myself and by myself. The songs took me somewhere and had me tapping into emotions I’d buried underneath. I had to become vulnerable and open up to myself and it helped me get on the path of actually healing.”
Power is the first project Amanda Black has released since departing from Ambitiouz Entertainment, the label that released her debut album in 2016.
Without the financial muscle of a label, a reasonable number of artists who leave labels often perish as resources to make world class art are hard to come by. It’s not the case with Power. The album sounds like money, and will definitely have a long shelf life.
Stream album below;
