Aluna's New Solo Album 'MYCELiUM' Challenges Dance Rules While Tapping Into Your Superpower
Photo by Maya Fuhr
"Unapologetic" is a term often used as a throwaway to describe Black women creators who are challenging the status quo. But many of them, including Aluna, aren't acting that way because it's a trend. No, it's their livelihood. The dance artist is continuing to redefine what dance means, feels and sounds like over the past few years—most notably with her debut solo album, 2020's Renaissance.
After making that powerful statement that celebrated the genre's roots (which stems from Black people), she's returned with her new album, MYCELiUM.
"The Mycelium is the cell network seeped into the fabric of nature. I’m not talking about the bloom or the fruits. You need to lay the groundwork to see the fruit one day," Aluna said of the album's title. "I got burnt out from trying to work with powerful people who have lots of money and no actual genuine care for what I’m trying to do. I realized there was no foundation where I was standing, and we have to build our own foundation."
And that she did: MYCELiUM is both about individuality and community, with guests like MNEK, Pablo Vittar, Kareen Lomax, Jayda G and more helping to amplify Aluna's mission statement. The change is near tangible and wrapped up in euphoric, '90s-inspired electronica.
In support of the album, Aluna will embark on a U.S. tour after hitting up a few festivals in North America, the U.K. and Eurie. You can find a complete schedule here. Below, Aluna discusses her new solo album MYCELiUM, the beauty of community and the changes that rave culture needs.
When we chatted previously, you mentioned that you feel like dance music currently is a bit shallow, because there's this monoculture. Why do you think it’s become more of a monolith?
Well, I'm not a historian. But it seems to me that it was not one particular thing. I would call it a network and system error. For dance music to thrive, we have live shows, record labels investing in artists, media talking about those artists, you have radio promoting those artists and now DSP platforms. So it was a perfect system that closed out diversity. There were different reasons for all of those things. So with the live scene, in particular, the policing of black and LGBTQ bodies has had a huge impact on whether or not they can survive in public spaces—especially when it comes to dancing.
There's an added factor—this is my personal opinion—which is that the white rave scene became very involved with drugs. And the Black community absolutely could not afford to get involved with that. I don't necessarily think on the whole that young Black teenagers were interested in taking drugs like that. But it was far more dangerous for a Black teenager to be caught taking drugs in the woods or a club. So that was also a deterrent. So the physical ability to go to these events was a big factor.
Secondly, since the people who ran the music industry are white, they felt more comfortable investing in white artists. Everyone's fine when it comes to Black people being in charge of invention. But when it comes to capitalizing and commercializing, they want to invest in white people. People can decide for themselves why that is. But there's a double-edged sword of that investment. A society that isn't able to build wealth, because it's possible for people to destroy that in its entirety. Then you have the after-effects of the media not talking about Black artists and dance music. And then that feeds into who's being promoted, who's being invested in labels, and who is being put onto stages as festivals became more open to dance music. So when I came to the decision to try and make a change for Black women in the dance music industry, there were so many factors I had to look at.
For sure. Community has been brought up so much in our conversations. In the album’s intro, you say “Deep underground love begins.” You’re creating this world and a safe space where people could really embrace love—for themselves, for other people and for the music in general.
Yeah, I think it's interesting because my journey wasn't directly that. I had to discover that through reverse engineering, in a way. I've never had community—they've always been very isolated. I’ve been the only Black girl in my city and school environments. So going from escaping that to breaking into the music industry onto a major label. The major label’s philosophy is mass on mass. Anyone at all, it doesn't matter who it is. Just appeal to as many people as possible. And don't worry about yourself, don't worry about whether people care about you, don't worry about whether you care about them, or anybody caring about anything.
The only thing you're allowed to really care about is your art. You can interact with fans but you're interacting with a ton of anonymous entities, especially when you're on a major label like that. And with platforms like Instagram—which has full control over your relationship with your friends—it became increasingly hard to understand what is this idea of community, you know? How do you do it? Starting small was the best learning experience for me. Just building the world around me one-on-one, with the idea that each of those relationships brings value that’s far greater than millions of people that maybe like your music or Instagram post.
So through that learning, I understood this idea of lateral connections. We talk about gatekeepers a lot and I challenged big corporations and people who are in charge of leverage, finance and power. But those are not the people who are going to walk with me. When things go wrong, they're going to drop the issue and turn their back. So understanding the power of connecting with the people who actually don't have the power but have the passion and the vision ultimately, has been more powerful.
Speaking of power, at this moment, “Mine O Mine” is my current favorite track. It got me through my workout because it has a very freeing and empowering theme. Do you feel more empowered at this point in your career now that you have more autonomy with your creativity?
I absolutely do. It's not that I haven't sought empowerment throughout my career. I think that as a young person getting into any life pathway, you're sort of looking for a goal. And I remember being a young teenager and just thinking, “I don't have passion. I don't know what passion is. I don't know what goals are, there is nothing to aim for. [laughs]
I mean, it happens. When we're young, we were trying to figure out what direction we want to go in.
I just couldn't see anything, I love music, but I couldn't see myself represented. So my first goal wsd success. And it seems like empowerment was a sidebar, just something that you would work on by yourself. The successful artists that I saw were already empowered and that's why they were successful—which is probably true, actually. And empowerment didn't come with success for me. So I was like, “Wait, these things not related at all? Because I'm so confused.”
Yeah, because you would think once you reach a certain level of success, you'll feel it feel more free. But sometimes the more success you have, you feel a little bit more sheltered.
So it wasn’t until I really started to dig into the effects of racism on my career before I could really understand what's going on. I was performing in stadiums, opening for Coldplay and Sia. And I felt like I didn't exist, especially since those audiences were predominantly white. It was terrifying, not just because of the size. But because I felt like I wasn’t really existing as a person. It's not like I came from a big family and community of Black people, and then found myself performing for Coldplay’s white audience. Everyone in the industry that I had met so far was white. Everyone in my city was white. And England's 2% Black. So unless you're living in the Black areas of London, we're not living around Black people.
I had to think to myself, “What is the effect of that? And what is the effect of not talking about it, not raising these issues of being the exception to the rule?” But as a light-skinned Black person, white people can be very, very comfortable not recognizing your Blackness. It's almost like after George Floyd, I came out as Black. And then the reactions that I got from white people who’ve known me all my life, were metaphorically like, “I didn't know you were Black. I didn't know you cared about being Black.” [laughs] Which was a really interesting time for me. And it felt like the same thing in the music industry. Because I hadn’t been seen in so many of my hits, I wasn't in music videos or on single cover art…I even performed for the Brit Awards and they didn’t even put my name on the screen. So it was a lot of erasure. And in interviews, no one asked me about or wasn't interested. But now I do feel empowered.
I'm glad you brought that up, especially with George Floyd. I remember when we first spoke back in 2020 when you first released Renaissance. That album really highlighted the Black diaspora and Black freedom. In comparison to when I listen to MYCELiUM, I'm I feel like I'm in a trance. It has this very euphoric momentum. It has a completely different experience. Was that intentional?
I think what it says is that I have a creative process. The first thing I wanted to do in this journey was break down all the barriers and boundaries I felt held in by creatively. I wanted to be very clear about what I consider to be dance music. So Renaissance was a space creation of the future of dance music, in the sense of we're not going to be subgenre-ing Afrobeats, afro-pop and amapiano and dancehall. It’s all mainstream dance music.
And don't pretend y'all aren’t ripping the sounds for your “tribal house” tracks. Case in point Disclosure’s [2020 Energy] album that they released directly after George Floyd was heavily influenced by African beats. And that was a really good example that I was using to say, “Don’t try and put this original music that’s being used in mainstream dance music in a subgenre, and then only highlight those people who have appropriated that sound. Because that's just not good quality, that's just a subpar version.
It’s so watered down and not authentic at all.
Exactly. That then gave me the ability to sit down and really go for MYCELiUM, because I felt like I had to create the room and space for me to just do exactly what I want to hear at a rave.
It's dropping at the perfect time because it's gonna bang in the summertime. I was just speaking to my friends about going to the Everyday People parties, and I feel like a majority of this album will be what the DJs will be spinning.
A night out has different parts to it, especially if you have different DJs. And I feel like MYCELiUM is definitely that high point where you're not taking breaks to go to the bar and you're really sweating. And Renaissance is a collection of music where maybe you're opening the night that way or you're closing the night that way. As a Black person, when I go out to a club I definitely want variety.
I meant to ask you this in our previous chat, but I was wondering if you got inspired by the different communities you've discovered while you were recording this album.
I didn’t get inspired by community in my songwriting process. But I definitely got inspired as to what environment I want that music to go into, ideally. So obviously I'm working on live shows, experiences, and events. That's very inspired by those communities, the way that a safe space is managed and created. And you definitely don't rely on the assumption that people will behave. That's one thing I learned. Unless you’re hosting a night that only appeals to one particular culture, like Trinidad carnival or something like that.
If you just got the general population, you've got to state very clearly that there's no homophobia, there's no touching without consent, there's no getting really sweaty and drunk on people. Those experiences have changed my complete perspective on going out. Now, when I'm at places where there's just no guidelines, when you look at the reports of some of these festivals at the end of the day, women were not safe—period. If they were, they were lucky. I think that just puts a lot of people off. For me, the way to change raving for the future is to protect the people who are raving as much as we can.
