Breaking Free From Self-Imposed Rules
There’s a particular kind of courage required to undo years of discipline and training, to look at the foundations you’ve built and decide they’re too restrictive. That’s precisely what Konyikeh has done on her latest EP Cinere, released just last month. The 26-year-old London-born, Essex-raised artist has spent the better part of a decade carefully constructing a sophisticated sonic palette – one that increasingly refuses to be confined by genre expectations or the neat categories music industry gatekeepers prefer.
The title itself tells you everything: Cinere, drawn from the Latin phrase “ex cinere” meaning “from the ashes,” is about burning down the rulebook she’d internalized. It’s about returning to the foundation she once desperately wanted to escape.
A Lifetime of Collected Sounds
Konyikeh’s story isn’t unusual in its broad strokes – a young talent spotted early, formal training, rising success – but the specifics reveal something far more interesting. At eight years old, a teacher at her Catholic primary school recognised something in her, and she auditioned successfully for Guildhall School of Music & Drama. The next decade immersed her completely in the classical world: orchestras, chamber choirs, music theory, the National Youth Orchestra, the National Youth Choir. Violin became her first language.
But here’s where it gets compelling. Outside rehearsal rooms, she was absorbing everything else. Pop on the radio with her mum. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals. Opera. Ballet. Then came the teenage years: Afroswing, J Hus, Southern rap. When she says she “grew up on everything,” she really does mean it.
The music wasn’t her only obsession either. Konyikeh devoured books with the same hunger – Jacqueline Wilson, the Cherub series, Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses. More recently, she’s returned to the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, drawn to its purposeful, emotive power. This literary sensibility bleeds through her work in ways that elevate it beyond the usual R&B formulas.
The Breakthrough Moment
Her emergence came with 2023’s Litany EP – a debut that introduced the world to a voice that felt simultaneously timeless and utterly distinctive. That sonorous, charming delivery caught attention quickly, but the real watershed moment arrived with her striking COLORS performance of ‘Girls Like Us’ in 2023. The pensive ballad showcased exactly what makes her special: technical sophistication married to genuine emotional vulnerability, classical sensibility woven through contemporary R&B.
The momentum was immediate. Opening slots for Sam Smith, Tems, and Jalen Ngonda followed. Last year, she earned her place on the NME 100 list, recognition of her status among Britain’s most compelling emerging talents. Then came the signing with FAMM, the independent label founded by Jorja Smith – a move that speaks volumes about artistic alignment.
Refusing the Box
Here’s what’s telling about Konyikeh’s trajectory: while critics and listeners have consistently tried to place her neatly within soul or R&B, neither label has ever quite fit. And that’s entirely the point. Her music doesn’t exist in a single lane; it exists in the spaces between genres, in the intersections of her creative journey.
For years, she was “scared to tap into” her classical background, as though it might undermine the contemporary credibility she’d worked to establish. It’s a fear many classically trained artists share – the worry that your first language will somehow invalidate everything else you speak. Cinere abandons that anxiety entirely. This EP pulls together the many worlds she’s spent her life moving between, treating them not as competing influences but as equal parts of a coherent whole.
On her partnership with Smith and FAMM, Konyikeh notes: “I think she’s been able to show people that you don’t have to stay in one box.” The observation applies equally to her own work. Smith has built a career refusing easy categorisation – moving between R&B, pop, soul, and experimental territory without apology. That’s the kind of artistic freedom Konyikeh is now claiming for herself.
The Liberation of Going Back to Basics
What’s fascinating about Cinere is that its innovation comes from returning to fundamentals. By reintegrating her classical training, Konyikeh isn’t moving backward – she’s completing a circle. The arrangement sophistication, the harmonic complexity, the structural boldness that classical music taught her now enhances rather than contradicts the contemporary sensibilities she’s absorbed.
This is an artist finally giving herself permission to be whole – to let every part of herself shine without apology or hierarchy. In a landscape where artists are often pushed toward specialisation and easy categorisation, that refusal is quietly radical.
Cinere isn’t just a new EP; it’s a artist’s declaration of independence from the limitations she’d internalised. And that’s exactly what makes it essential listening.
