July 9, 2025 – Today, Paris-based singer/songwriter ALA.NI announces the September 19 release of Summer Meadows via No Format Records. An open-armed embrace of the bittersweet side of life, the album takes inspiration from a two-year stint in the Caribbean. Alongside the announcement, she’s also releasing “This Is Why,” a bossa-infused number channeling the conflicted introspection of a new romance.
“This was the first one I wrote, and it feels like it connects with my first album You & I,” ALA.NI shares. ‘This Is Why’ is about being unable to accept love when it’s too easy. I tend to back off rather than leaning into it, and I kind of question it: ‘Oh, why is this so easy? Shouldn’t it be difficult?’ I want to fight for it.”
Written in the throes of a frigid Paris winter, Sunshine Music hums with the memory of the heat of her two and a half year sojourn in Barbados, Grenada and Jamaica. The album stitches together a tapestry of influences from calypso, jazz, bossa nova and the great postwar songbook, threaded together by ALA.NI’s singular voice and sensibility. What truly binds the record is its emotional core – a quiet resilience and a lingering warmth born of both memory and defiance. The artist also reaches outwards into broader political territory: calling for reparations, confronting the legacy of colonial theft and weaving personal experience into cautionary tales about narcissism and survival.
“Living in Jamaica was the first time I had lived in a Black-majority country,” ALA.NI shares. “Jamaicans are very unapologetically themselves. I’ve chosen to live in Paris, and I feel more myself and more expressive and more comfortable here than I did in London, and more appreciated and valued as an artist too. But there are microaggressions and microracisms that we have to live with every single day as people of color. When I moved out of that environment, I was like, ‘Shit, that’s what I’ve been dealing with all this time.’I was just getting on and accepting certain negative behaviors as an act of mental survival.”
For Sunshine Music, ALA.NI invited French jazz fusion artist Clément Petit to co-produce —
a first for her. Petit, known for his work with Blick Bassy and Roseaux, adds breadth to the record’s textures without blurring ALA.NI’s crystalline vision.
Born to Grenadian parents and raised in London, ALA.NI comes from a storied musical background, her great-uncle being Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchison, an infamous cabaret icon of the pre-WWII era. Since emerging with her debut You & I in 2016 – a self-produced set of exquisitely restrained torch songs that earned her a performance on Later… with Jools Holland and a Tiny Desk Concert – ALA.NI has built a reputation as a distinctive voice beyond easy classification. Her 2020 follow-up ACCA layered beatbox and vocal textures into dense, intricate arrangements, drawing contributions from figures like LaKeith Stanfield and Iggy Pop and earning acclaim from Associated Press, NYLON, The FADER and many more. Along the way, she has collaborated and performed with artists as diverse as Mary J. Blige, Blur, Nitin Sawhney, Andrea Bocelli, Chassol and Jon Batiste.
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