Get to know Dawn Richard

Dawn Richard is not your average former reality show contestant. Having earned her place in mid-noughties US girl group Danity Kane via Puff Daddy’s Making The Band, she’s now making the kind of avant-garde r’n’b you’d expect from FKA Twigs or Grimes. She worked briefly again with Diddy on his Diddy Dirty Money project before realising her vision could not be compromised any further.

“I do everything myself now,” she tells us. “It’s difficult but fun. I don’t have people telling me my cinematic ideas are too much; I create my own world.” Her new album ‘Redemptionheart’ is the third in a trilogy that began with ‘Goldenheart’ in 2013, followed by the broken-hearted ‘Blackheart’ two years later.

“Game Of Thrones’n’b” is how Richard, originally from New Orleans but now living in Baltimore, explains her fantastical music. “The inspiration was Joan of Ark: the naive warrior going into battle.” The theme for album #3 is red, with Machinedrum and Kingdom on board to provide “vibrancy”.

“This story has to be told sonically, and I feel like the BPM of electronic music does that,” she says. “Chicago footwork and the spatial sounds Kingdom makes –
they connect my story to a sound.”

The freedom to express yourself is explicitly political in a world where the forces of conservatism often seem to be in the ascendancy. Richard, who has a large gay following, says she will address that notion on the record. “Red is about handling things unapologetically and with aggression. You should be able to say what you feel and be who you are.”

The same applies to her own career: proof there’s life beyond the mainstream, if you have the audacity to dream.

‘Cali Sun’ by Dawn Richard is out now on MBK/RED