If you’re not already familiar with Natanya Popoola’s name, you should acquaint yourself with it quickly. The NME 100 act’s breakout tracks ‘Foolish’ and ‘Dangerous’ have garnered love on TikTok, earning her nearly 200,000 monthly Spotify listeners, and the 23-year-old north-west London vocalist-producer (who releases and performs under her first name) has spent the last 12 months shaping a sound that slips between electronica, R&B, soul and dance – controlled, expansive, and impossible to box in. That originality recently caught the attention of SZA, who commented under a clip of Natanya lip-syncing along to the dreamy ‘On Ur Time’, amplifying a song that was never written for virality, but carried the emotional weight to travel anyway.
“I made ‘On Ur Time’ because I was in a situationship that was really hurting my feelings,” Natanya explains over Zoom, voice soft and mellow. The song was sparked during a bike ride in the park while she was in the third year of her English degree at UCL. She “really struggled with expressing her emotions” about her romantic ordeal and “just couldn’t get it out of my mind”. After she rode past the bench where she and her elusive partner had their first kiss, she went home and sat at her piano – the place she always ends up when feelings feel too slippery – and the words flew out: “The first thing that came out of my mouth was, ‘You know I passed the park where we shook hands…’”
At the time, Natanya had been listening closely to artists who knew how to articulate heartbreak with specificity. “I love SZA for how she writes so honestly about love that goes wrong,” she says. “When she writes about breakups, she knows how to attack every single nuance you’ve never heard before. It’s like how Amy Winehouse writes about them.”
That lineage surfaces directly in the song, which namechecks SZA by her given name. “I didn’t calculate it – I was just like, ‘Solana’s on my speaker,’ because she was.” When SZA later found the track online and introduced it to a wider audience, the response caught Natanya off guard. “I didn’t expect ‘On Ur Time’ to be the song that would expose the project to so many people,” she admits. “So when SZA found it, I was in shock.”
That instinct – returning to the piano when language fails – didn’t appear overnight. Natanya grew up studying classical piano up to grade six level, but the discipline required didn’t immediately translate into expression. “I found piano really hard,” she says. “My musical understanding is way more ear-dominant. I’m a bad sight reader.” She could play demanding romantic and modern compositions – Chopin, Rachmaninov, you name it – but they felt sealed off, technical before they were emotional.
So when she saw an older student playing jazz on the piano after school, she had to ask what she was doing. It was an encounter that opened up her musical world: she followed the older girl to a weekend academy where they learnt how to transcribe songs by ear – absorbing harmony and feeling rather than notation.
Natanya didn’t know how to marry jazz’s free-formed expression with her classical training until she discovered Winehouse’s ‘Frank’ and Tyler, The Creator’s ‘Cherry Bomb’. Their authorship – particularly, Winehouse’s honesty and Tyler’s adaptability – reframed how she understood songwriting and “it made sense all of a sudden”. She wanted to try to weave her classical training with whatever production software she could get her hands on (often on a single computer at her secondary school). “I’m very all-in,” she adds. “I’ll try anything. I’m very experimental as a human being.”
That experimental instinct comes through on ‘Feline’s Return’– a two-act EP released in 2025 that introduced Natanya to a wider audience as a musical maestro. Years before, she had released an EP called ‘Sorrows At Sunrise’, which boasted the cinematic early standout ‘Angel’. Now, though, she says that release was “more emotional”, with the sole focus of “documenting where she was at the time,” instead of “paying attention to things like structure or hooks”.
“I really do believe that I’m protecting something that’s going to be legendary”
With ‘Feline’s Return’, she wanted to make her music “infectious”, using words “like paint” to insinuate things in a more subtle way. Its songs stretch across electronica, R&B, soul and pop, stitched together by worldly rhythms, chiming melodic accents and layered production that often feels larger than the room it was made in – adopting Natanya’s new “urgency and hustle”. She decided to stop “showing people exactly how chaotic [her] emotions are” and translate them into something more physical, so she could “make people dance as much as possible”.
By the time she began work on the EP, her approach to making music had changed. “The main difference was that I took control,” Natanya says. “When I was making ‘Sorrow At Sunrise’, I was heartbroken, and I let so much happen to me. Even in the studio, I wouldn’t take control.” This time, she arrived with “pre-made demos that sounded nearly identical to the finished masters, [knowing] exactly what every song was to be”.
That focus came amid the massive upheaval she experienced in 2024 – a period when she was touring Europe, opening for rising R&B juggernauts FLO and Destin Conrad, and finishing up her university work. But among the success and new opportunities, there was also pain and strife. Two days before she joined Conrad on tour, her grandma died. Then, while on the road, the team she’d built around her “broke apart”.
Natanya was physically and mentally spent and was faced with a choice between fight or flight. At one point, she nearly left Conrad’s tour early. “I called my dad, saying I wanted to go home,” she recalls. His response was firm: finish it. But there was still a nagging part of her that wondered whether she should “stay and be scared” of navigating the industry alone, or if this was “the sign” she needed to go in “the opposite direction and find [her]self”. In the end, she stuck with it – after all, she isn’t a quitter.
Now, Natanya is looking to the future and is currently working towards another collection of songs. The project is still taking shape, but she’s aiming to create something that’s both “like ‘Feline’s Return’, but also a complete deviation” from her frenetic-yet-soaring sound.
The paramount thing for the singer and producer is how she reacts to the music that comes out of her. “The human body knows what makes it feel good, whether you’re trained or not,” she philosophises. “If I listen to a song and I can’t feel it, I have to go back. I don’t want to release something that feels passive.” She’s keeping any further details on what she’s working on close to her chest – a precautionary move so as not to jinx building something with the scale and staying power of the records that raised her: “I really do believe that I’m protecting something that’s going to be legendary.”