Tsew The Kid releases his first album – N’Kruma
- After a mixtape in 2019, the artist returns this Friday with a first album entitled “Ayna”.
- The artist opens up with emotions on love and amorous setbacks, and slips many nods to his family and his Malagasy origins.
With just his stage name, the 24-year-old artist has something to grab attention. Tsew The Kid, three words that contain different sides of him. Starting with Tsew, a Malagasy suffix, which he draws from his origins. Attached to his first name, Tsiry, it means “lucky star”. Then there is The Kid, a reference to one of the most famous outlaws in American history. “I’m quite turbulent even though it may not yet be felt enough in my music. It is often the sensitive side that I bring out but I know that I still have a lot of things to explore in music, especially this crazy and moody side ”, explains the artist to 20 minutes.
Indeed, for the moment Tsew The Kid is evolving in a fairly smooth musical universe. Urban pop where he mixes hip-hop, piano and acoustic guitars sounds. He also likes to slip into a register of “Lo-fi Hip-hop”, a “phasing” music with chill rhythms, “that you can listen to when you are studying or before sleeping,” he explains.
After very noticed titles like Cigarette and Even monsters dream of love and the mixtape Diavolana in 2019, he returns on Friday with his very first album, entitled Ayna. Eighteen titles in which he explores with an open heart the feelings that run through him, love and its disillusions, or the strength of family ties. To listen in the order of the album, or by decrypting the coded message of the last song Outro, these eighteen titles freeze like a snapshot, the unfolding of its year 2020.
“I know that in the urban environment it’s quite difficult to talk about love”
“This album is the reflection of my life for a year, I discovered myself while doing it,” Tsew The Kid confides. When I went to the studio I told what I was going through, I tried to put words into my emotions. »A year marked by a love story, which is revealed with ardor in We don’t care about the others, with sentimentality on the sweet song Fitia, or with sadness in No more love to give you. The artist also shares his dark thoughts, his anger, his loneliness.
“I know that in the urban environment, just like in many other environments, it’s quite difficult to talk about love or to lay bare and show your sensitivity. It is interpreted a bit as a sign of weakness. But I find that it’s a strength, that’s why I really put it forward, I feel me and true when I do it, ”says Tsew The Kid. He thus takes the emotions as they come, and even records his tears at the heart of his songs, as in Tell me. “Regarding this sound where I cracked and cried, it was really the best studio feeling of all my life, the atmosphere was magical. It happened very spontaneously and everyone was very touched. I told myself that we were going to keep this take because that’s how I felt the sound and how I sang it. I find that it really gives an energy and that it is authentic ”.
“The family is really a pillar in my life”
If this album reveals the great sensitivity of the artist, it also gives pride of place to a whole part of his history. Tsew The Kid was born in France, then grew up for the first six years of his life in Madagascar, where part of his family resides. It was there that he especially developed his musical ear. “We lived in a house with five families, uncle’s and aunts, a lot of cousins, and it was the playground all the time! We spent a lot of time together, even musically. We made music or we watched the grown-ups make it and we sang with them, things that marked me quite a bit. “
As he grew up, he would then learn music by watching his father play the piano and guitar, and his mother singing. With his brothers and sisters, they all together form a small family choir. “Family is really a pillar in my life. It had enormous benefits for me, my childhood and the adult I have become. I claim it because I realize that it is not always the case for everyone to have a united family. “
Returning to France as a child, he did not return to Madagascar until many years later, in 2019. “It was something, I found smells, atmospheres, places that I had frequented younger, like my old school. It made me feel good and it also reminded me of where I came from ”. Imbued with nostalgia, he has sprinkled bits of this culture throughout his album, in his titles, his melodies, like “little winks” to mark this “return to the sources, to his roots”. In parallel with music, he has also undertaken another project on the island for a few months, the construction of an orphanage, a family project, always.