Released October 30th, Naya Yeira’s debut EP Almost There is a 6-track project which blends music with her prowess in digital art, creating a world centred around the process we all go through: both the beauty and pain of a journey of authenticity. Almost There mirrors growth is rarely linear, and the most interesting part of it all is to create within the uncertainties; “It’s kind of accepting that it’s okay to be a beginner in something and starting something meaningful,” she says.
With the EP being 3 years in the making, Jakarta born, London based Naya shares how the creative environment she encountered coming to the UK aged 18 differed from the one she had known growing up, “I learned to write from a perspective of someone from the outside looking in in both cultures,” she explains, opening up on her embracing the opportunity to explore her individuality in ways that had previously felt unfamiliar. “Where I grew up it’s a very collective kind of society,” she reflects, “I remember just trying to fit in all the time and to have a sense of individuality was something I was really scared of, which is why I grew up really shy.” London became a place of self-discovery, where she built her now identity through a series of small but personal decisions. From the colours she gravitated towards, to the clothes she wanted to wear, and being okay with experimenting with sounds enabled Naya to understand herself from differnent angles.
The journey means a lot to Naya who boldly rejected the compulsion many have to ride off the back of a trending moment, going into how her earliest releases in Indonesia gained major popularity online; “It felt lost because they were just school projects that I released and went viral. I didn’t know who I was as an artist, I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about… I was like, ‘What, you want more? I don’t even know who I am.’” Rather than simply adopting a forced identity, Naya had the confidence to intentionally build herself a foundation and grow a personal brand that felt genuinely her own. This is likely why Naya’s music feels so open to possibility: her experience refuses to fit neatly into a single category, so there is little reason for her creativity to do so either.
With a creative outlook shaped from an early exposure to the film industry through her father, a director, this sparked Naya’s love affair with visual expression that compliments instead of compete with her sonic world. Today, she draws on an expansive range of disciplines, from digital design and mixed media to 3D artistry and creative coding, taking an increasingly active role in shaping the full presentation of her work, she beams, “I think as an independent artist you kinda have to DIY a lot of things.” By combining these skills with her musical practice, Naya creates a distinctive artistic identity where not being confined is her ethos, sharing, “I don’t think I’d ever make a purist, like, pure R&B or just pop [project]. I would always wanna experiment and push myself,” with the EP Almost There being a direct reflection of her desire for expansion and vocal freedom, going on to say, “For one of the songs, ‘Hit record’, I had to explore this really low range of mine- I was like, ‘I didn’t know I could do that.’”