There's no shortage of young, ambitious, and ruthlessly talented R&B singers from the States, and especially not from California, which seems to be the Western mecca for emerging artists of any kind, really. We've seen this truth with examples we couldn't cap if we tried, but, astonishingly, each makes their way to prominence with their own formula it seems. There's less and less copy and pasting as it relates to one artist's style to another these days, and, to be sure, as the individuals behind the art decrease in age (a trend we've seen expand in prevalence), their free-spirited ways of creativity increase exponentially. It all makes for fun, honestly exciting listening experiences we can't get enough of. TELANA, a seventeen-year-old R&B up-and-comer from Los Angeles (go figure), may or may not be aware of our sentiments (she probably isn't), but with her debut EP, AETHER, she's given us exactly the kind of spirited creativity we crave. Sure, we there are only three tracks on it, and we ought to therefore balance any hype generated with the small sample size, but still, it's a project riddled with passionate, effortlessly cool R&B aesthetics that seems to be all the rage right now, and, even better, it's the musical backbone to back it up (you didn't think we'd post something just to see it blow up, did you?). Of course not. Within "Gemini", "Smoke Love", and "F11" (the three tracks on the EP), we're thrust into TELANA's emotionally driven world, where dimly lit soundscapes and croons and cries roam freely like an animal in the wild; and for their duration, they don't lose their grip on those who tune in to them. Sure, at times they get almost methodical in their execution, but what do you want from talent as young as TELANA's? The body of work is entirely impressive, all things considered, and as soon as she's a longer, perhaps more feature-filled work to make visible to the world, we think she could enter the ranks of the upper R&B echelons. Watch TELANA's stirring new video for "Gemini" below.
TELANA