What is the mark of an outstanding artist? One answer is timeless composure that can’t be fabricated or learned – and CARI carries such quiet poise in her emotive, guitar-led R&B. While the west Londoner has so far made her name with heavy topics and moody sonics, she also brings a sense of fluidity – both personally and sonically – to her growing body of work.
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Two weeks after the release of her debut EP ‘Flux’, CARI braves a cold to meet NME for a chat. “I’ve had to cancel my sessions for the last two days because I can’t breathe out of my nose,” she says. Still, she later intends to hoist herself to the studio to sit in on her manager, who is also a producer, to “absorb the session vibes”; there’s little time for rest when you’re manifesting your life-long dream.
Her musical obsessions began young. Raised in a British-Caribbean household, CARI recalls her mother’s love of R&B and her father’s extensive vinyl collection of rare groove, reggae and neo-soul – “a traditional Sunday cleaning playlist when you grow up in a Caribbean household”. As a Seventh Day Adventist, CARI grew up singing in church, first picking up a guitar to impress a boy. Needless to say, her bond with the instrument outlasted her crush, and her songwriting snowballed after her grandma bought her her first guitar.
“I’ve always written things, not necessarily songs, but poems and stories. I really loved language and literature,” CARI says. The first songs she wrote were Christian songs: “I’d perform originals sometimes at church. I love writing just as much as I love singing and playing guitar,” she adds. “I like how the context of something could change with a comma.”
“If I had one thing I would want people to take away, it’s that I’ve been courageous, and they can be courageous too”
This community of joyous celebration, gospel and song sparked a collaborative ethos that CARI has carried into her career. “The whole church would sing, whether you could sing in key or not,” she says. “I have very visceral reactions to gospel music – it evokes a lot.”
Her roots continue to influence her music: CARI often returns to her family’s homeland of Grenada to switch off the noise and write, feeling grounded by the slower pace of life there. “I feel like my nervous system resets,” she says. “It’s like you’re stepping into a new dimension.”
In the years since she began writing ‘Flux’, CARI feels she perceives life with more nuance: “Everything is constantly in flux. The older you get, the more you make space for alternative realities and ideas, and you can juggle things more gracefully.” Her journey here, though, began in 2019 and is the culmination of years of consistent work.
It wasn’t long ago that she was funding her ambitions by working at an Apple store; it’s where she begged for the day off following the release of her debut single ‘Colder In June’ two years ago. “I’ve been making music for a really long time and not sharing anything,” says CARI. “So, it does feel like nothing about this process at all has been speedy. Now it’s out, I’m like, OK, that needed to happen… it feels like everything in its time.”
Slow rumination has been key to CARI’s path as an artist. That said, the aforementioned ‘Colder In June’ took off instantaneously, its raw vulnerability and astute lyricism clocking nearly 1million streams on Spotify. Not bad for an innocent streaming platform upload by an independent talent who “didn’t know that there were such things as editorial playlists”.
“That single was about my first heartbreak, which was devastating,” CARI explains. Its success has been gratifying: “Because I know where that song came from and I know how deep I had to dig to get that out there, it feels like a personal triumph.” The lyrics “Is it still love if you got to beg for it”’ and “Trying to heal while I was still under him” capture how CARI was trapped in a dismissive cycle of earned affection. “I think it was the novelty of being in a first relationship,” she continues. “When you’re in relationships that aren’t healthy for too long, it starts to chip away at your self-esteem, and that can also keep you there.”
‘Colder In June’ ends on the line “I’m sorry for the things you’ve done” – CARI’s subtle deflection of blame betraying female conditioning and the inclination to take responsibility for her partner’s wrongs. “It’s such a woman thing, to apologise for things they haven’t necessarily needed to – it’s like a mechanism we’re almost taught,” she says. “If I can capture the grief into something that I can nod my head to and enjoy, then I’ve turned lemons into lemonade.”
‘Bleeding’ proved the culmination of her purge. A crestfallen, aching collaboration with Tendai [Stormzy, Arya Starr] and CARI’s trusted producer Melo-Zed, the track unlocked residual resentment over the relationship that seeped into its striking visuals, where CARI smears red paint on cell walls. “When I was leaving and washing the red paint off my clothes, it [felt] like I embodied what I was singing about,” she says. “Singing that song to this day can be triggering. The few times I’ve performed this song, people sing it word for word – it feels like group therapy.”
Despite the emotional underpinnings of ‘Flux’, writing the EP gave CARI a space to alchemise her pain into play. While guitar is “the cornerstone of my music”, she cites Brandy in particular as “the blueprint” in the way she stacks her vocals; CARI believes artists “don’t pay homage as much as they should” to her, considering how her influence has bled into the idioms of R&B. ‘Flux’ oscillates from the whimsical and delicate (‘Creatures’) to moody R&B (‘Luvhiii’) to sludgy, D’Angelo– and Prince-inspired funk that captures the lusty tension of a situationship (‘Phuckups’).
A sense of unburdening is palpable in the EP closer ‘Over And Over’. CARI recalls how the restrained and contemplative instrumental made her think about her insecurities before slowly building to a breezier, more hopeful climax. Ultimately, she sees it as a doorway to write about brighter and lighter things. “I’ve said everything I need to say about that particular relationship; it’s freed up space for nicer experiences. If I had one thing I would want people to take away, it’s that I’ve been courageous, and they can be courageous too.”
CARI’s ‘Flux’ is out now