Mahalia

One Liner:  Alt R&B with a little rap work from England

Wikipedia Genre: Wikipedia doesn't say a genre, I'll say alternative R&B.
Home: Syston, England.

Poster Position: 19

Weekend Two Only.

Thoughts: This is one of those young artists with one real album but a monster string of singles.  A 2015 four song EP, a 2016 album, a 2018 EP called Seasons, and a string of a jillion singles and remixes in the midst of those.  Speaking of which, I can't stand when I get locked into a string of remixes of the same song on Spotify.  Interrupts my work when I can't stand to hear the same tune for the 6th iteration (especially if the song is kind of annoying even in its original form).

Mahalia is just her first name, and she is from something called "Syston, Charnwood, in Leicestershire."  Eng-eh-land or summin', innit?  Cheerio, oi!  Her very limited Wikipedia says that she signed her first deal at age 13, which is wild.  But her first stuff you can find on Spotify would have been when she was more like 17, so it seems to have taken her a while to get there.  If I'm being honest, she is not going to get a fair treatment here - I'm busy with work today, and I'm just very tired of hearing her music, so I just opened this up while saying to myself "let's get her fucking done and get something good going."  Which is unfair.  This is pretty good music, if you like alt-R&B-type soul music stuff.  She's got catchy hooks and a good voice.  I just need someone with a pile of guitars to take my brain into a higher gear right now.

Her top track is a single from 2018 called "I Wish I Missed My Ex," with 23.7 million streams.

Fun track - good lyrically, a happy beat and interesting sound.  Good track.  Plus, doing videos backwards never gets old - The Phaycyde did my favorite one, but this works really well too.  By the way, none of her top ten tracks are on that 2016 album - must not have been the best part of her work, which is why she just does singles now.

We'll go with her newest song, even though she has another ("Sober") with 20 million streams.  This is "Simmer" with 550k streams, but (holy shit) released on July 3 so absolutely blowing up here by July 9.  Half a million streams in a week?  That can't be right.

Maybe Burna Boy is the greatest artist in the world and I just missed it?  I mean, that's a cool sounding track, but those are some major numbers.  Funny thing, neither of these two songs are very representative of most of her catalog, which goes more towards the chill alt R&B stuff, while these lean towards rap and reggaeton.

Probably won't go see her.