When Mei Semones began recording Animaru, she was working out of a bedroom studio in East London with nothing but a laptop, a battered condenser mic, and a year's worth of voice memos she'd been too afraid to revisit. The result is one of the most quietly ambitious debut full-lengths in recent memory — a record that holds its own weight without ever raising its voice.
We met Semones at a café in Dalston on a grey Tuesday afternoon. She arrived early, ordered tea she forgot to drink, and spent the next hour talking with the kind of focused honesty that makes you wonder how much of it ends up in the songs. The answer, it turns out, is most of it. Animaru is an autobiography with the names changed — or, as she puts it, "a diary written in someone else's handwriting."
