Greentea Peng
Tell Dem It’s Sunny
★★★★
AWAL
Breezily ditching that well-established creative principle “show, don’t tell,” Greentea Peng outlined exactly what she was setting out to do with her music on her ambitious 2021 debut Man Made. “This sound,” the south London-born singer-songwriter declared, “is physical… metaphysical and mystical,” before defining it as “sensual”, “alchemical” and “like medicine.” She ended with an instruction: “now open wide and let it in”.
If it seemed like a lot to absorb, Greentea Peng – the stage name adopted by Aria Wells – happily delivered on her claims, merging psychedelic soul, woozy trip-hop and Erykah Badu-influenced R&B into broad-spectrum beats, a holistic alternative therapy groove designed to work against tough times. Tell Dem It’s Sunny has a similarly medicinal quality, but Wells’s second album doesn’t work in a puff of healing smoke or as a few drops under the tongue: it’s a bitterer, sharper-edged kind of pill to swallow. Even Glory, where Wells sings the album’s title over a treacly, heat-stroked Balearic groove, sounds like it’s just clinging on to the sunny side, aware of incoming clouds of ambient smog. “I’m fucking exhausted,” she says after the kaleidoscope-eyes intro of One Foot, “Messed up, distorted.”
Wells might still immerse herself in the trippily spiritual side of life, but these songs are bolted down into the real world, a space shared with her former collaborators Neneh Cherry and Mike Skinner. Over the buzzy third-rail beats of TARDIS (Hardest), she details her journey to her collaborator Earbuds’ studio – “from West Ham to Norwood” - putting herself firmly in the here and now as she describes her commitment to her work, her attempts to resist darkness. “I’m shaking through my pen and into page,” she drawls, her steady delivery masking the urgency of her words, “I think I found a way to shape my rage.”
On every song, there’s detail that destabilises and derails: the Ghost Town groan underneath the downbeat Wu-Lu collaboration My Neck, for example (its title possibly an ironic echo of the X-rated Khia track); the Sour Times thrum of Green, or the ’90s squat-aggro guitar on Create And Destroy. Wells’s Amy Winehouse smoke-ring of a voice, meanwhile, is right in the room but always slightly off to the side, finding the subtleties even in comparatively straight-ahead break-up song Stones Throw.
“I am not who I was yesterday,” Wells sings on I AM (Reborn), “Don’t act like you know me.” Tell Dem It’s Sunny feels like the work of an artist in motion, brain whirring even when she appears serene. This time, this sound pitches harder and faster between the troubled and the transcendent, the mystical and the physical, but Greentea Peng is still dispensing powerful medicine.
Tell Dem It’s Sunny is out now on AWAL.
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