Alex Mali is a native Brooklynite of Trini-Jamaican extraction whose music advocates personal empowerment on the lyrical tip all the while seducing listeners into self-surrender with its flowing syncopations and overall underwater ambience. This weekend Mali was featured as part of the online (is there any other kind?) Adult Swim Festival performing a tight twelve-minute rooftop set recorded as dusk turned to dark over the city. The resulting ambiance speaks to our current moment–isolated and ghostly, defiant and self-possessed. After a triptych of songs in which our narrator fends off gossip mongers and sketchy suitors and broke-boy hanger-on-ers Mali finally achieves release on “Good Good” (“I can feel it in my lungs / I can feel it in my body / Oh it got me speaking in tongues / I can feel it and I want it”) adding touches of melisma and other vocal embellishment to the version heard on her 2020 EP Phenom which is already itself quite high on the ecstatic-o-meter.
Finally, for dessert, check out the official video for “Good Good” below wherein Mali and a cadre of coordinated dancers take Grand Army Plaza by force. And then if that’s not enough, tomorrow, Wednesday at 3PM EST, you can watch a livestreaming video premiere of "Fighting Words," the first number heard in the set above, on the YouTube with preceiding livechat. Speak your peace directly to the artist or forever hold your peace. Peace out y’all. (Jason Lee)