Lollise’s Afrofuturistic Pop Utopia
The Botswana-raised, New York-based artist talks about her dazzling pan-African paeans to family, fables, and home.
Lollise’s “eDube” video opens with a photo of the artist as a baby, dressed in a sweet blue pinafore and staring inquisitively at the camera from atop a yellow couch. Behind the photo, the current Lollise fades in, wearing a ruffled gown and standing regally with her arm aloft—the promise of the child manifested in the possibility of adulthood.
On the bright pop song, which is inspired by Congolese soukous and Nigerian highlife, Lollise sings in English and Kalanga, linking her current life in Queens, New York to her upbringing in Francistown, Botswana, where her family still lives. It unfurls into a powerful meditation on the melancholy of displacement, and she grapples with a dissonance that can accompany immigration—a sense of yearning in the background, even if the new place is instrumental to your self-actualization. “I mold myself to be the way that I be,” she sings, in the low voice of benediction. “I come, I go, my land remember me.”
The song is a highlight from Lollise’s debut full-length, I Hit the Water, a profound pop album that experiments with the genres she grew up hearing—kwaito, Xitsonga, Zimbabwean sungura, South African bubblegum—atop a foundation of forward-thinking synth melodies. Her throaty alto is warm and striking, with a range that vibrates in the low notes, and she layers herself into pyramidal harmonies as she explores topics of family, freedom and, occasionally, stunting. I Hit the Water is not memoir, Lollise tells me one summer day in Brooklyn, but it is an homage.
