FROM KIMBERLEY TO BROOKLYN: LORDKEZ TAKES HER PLACE AT COLORSxSTUDIOS
There is a room in Brooklyn that does something to an artist. No performance lighting, no crowd energy to borrow from, no production tricks to hide behind, just a single performer, a spare backdrop, and a camera that has learned, over years of watching, exactly where to look. Artists who walk into COLORSxSTUDIOS and walk out bigger are not made by the room. They were already that. The room simply refuses to let anyone pretend otherwise. lordkez walked into that room. What came out was Wena Fela.
The Kimberley-born singer-songwriter has been announced as the latest featured artist in EMERGENT, the multi-year global program run by COLORSxSTUDIOS in partnership with Levi’s, designed to spotlight artists at the precise moment their creative lives shift gear. Her A COLORS SHOW performance, filmed at the Brooklyn studio and produced in collaboration with Levi’s, is now out in the world, and with it, a single that announces, quietly but unmistakably, that something larger is on its way.
lordkez | SUPPLIED
Wena Fela is not a throwaway drop. The phrase itself, Zulu, weighted, capable of meaning devotion or dissolution depending on who says it and how, carries the kind of emotional density lordkez has always worked in. It lives in the body before it reaches the mind. As a title, it is a statement of intent, this is not music built for playlists. It is music built for feeling. The single is a window into a forthcoming album, its edges deliberately left open, its arrival still held close. What the COLORSxSTUDIOS moment confirms is not that lordkez has arrived, it is that the industry has finally caught up to where she has been standing. Testament. You, Me & The 90s. midsummer. A body of work constructed with the patience of someone who was never chasing a trend, only a truth. Collaborations with Bas, Shekhinah, Jelani Blackman, and Cassper Nyovest have positioned her inside a generation of African artists who think globally without performing it. Her appearance at the Cape Town International Jazz Festival earlier this year added another room to a growing list of rooms that have tried to contain what she does and found themselves slightly too small for it.
“The journey in discovering my personal identity has happened through my greatest passion, which is making music,” lordkez said of the EMERGENT recognition. “I found myself becoming more of myself with every new step I took. I still feel I am on that journey right now, so being recognised within EMERGENT as a voice that represents where I come from on a global scale is
a huge honour for me.”
lordkez | SUPPLIED
On Levi’s end, the language is equally precise. “lordkez moves on her own terms and meticulously crafts sounds that look forward and ahead,” said Les Green, Senior Director of Collaborations and Music Partnerships at Levi’s. “Alongside the incredible COLORS team, we’re proud to shine a light on her music and her individuality as an artist.” EMERGENT is a program that has made stops across Mexico, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Japan, a circuit of cultural capitals that now includes, by way of lordkez, the sound of South Africa on its own terms.
That is the thing worth sitting with. Not the co-sign, not the global exposure, not even the album that waits on the other side of this moment, though all of it matters. What matters most is that a room built to strip everything back and reveal what is actually there looked at lordkez and found exactly what she said it would find, an artist who has never been anything other than herself.