Some sounds or music moments force one into a type of submission on the heart and the consciousness understands. The moment you are sent a song or an album to review, you sort of want to listen to it on your feet, standing, waiting for it to literally rock your world, even when they promise that it will slow it down. It is rare.
We live in a time of immediacy, of music engineered for virality and volume, for the quick hit rather than the long exhale. So when something arrives quietly, almost apologetically, asking not for your attention but for your surrender, you have to stop and listen differently. However, Zoya Uwineza Mothupi-Sarges, better known as Uwineza and her upcoming nine-track album titledWingsoffer just that.
It does not demand to be played loudly. It does not beg to be understood immediately. Instead, it sits with you, waits for you to arrive and only then begins to speak.
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Wingsis a quiet work that requires reflection and surrender, which in all honesty most of us need in this new year. It is the kind of album that meets you where you are emotionally but also gently nudges you toward where you might need to be. There is no rush here, no urgency to impress.
Just honesty, space and a willingness to sit in discomfort until it becomes something else. The album, set for release in April, follows her debut album titledYou’re Gonna Hate It, which was released in 2025. Where that first body of work felt like an introduction — guarded, slightly ironic, testing the waters —Wingsfeels like a deep breath taken once the door has been closed and the noise has been shut out.
It is not a response to anything external. It is an inward conversation. This new body of work offers stillness, much like how the album was made, in the Greek Islands.
Stillness not as emptiness but as presence. As awareness. As the act of staying long enough in one place for thoughts to catch up with the body.
You can hear it in the pacing of the songs, in the restraint of the arrangements, in the way silence is allowed to exist alongside sound. We catch up with Uwineza, who is enjoying some safari, to tell us about this stillness right before the beginning of the rat race. There is something fitting about that — speaking about quiet, about reflection, while the world waits impatiently for you to re-enter it.
“We’re not bored often enough anymore. So I guess that stillness was being in one spot. It was a great position to be in.
To be at a beach in one spot and under the sun and contemplating or actually just listening to your inner voice.” “So I think that, stillness, ironically means that. There’s a lot of unrest going on mentally, in the quiet. I feel like nowadays we have so many distractions that help us to not have to listen to that inner voice.
But the longer you don’t just succumb to that stillness, the harder it becomes to achieve it after a while,” she shares with us in a video meeting under a thatched roof building. Stillness is evident in the three songs that we got a chance to listen to. You can almost hear the space she was in when compiling the work.
The light. The unhurried passing of time. I have never been to Greece before but I was whisked away when I heard the composition of the sound in the songs.
There is something transportive about them, not in an escapist sense but in the way they allow you to imagine yourself somewhere quieter, somewhere less cluttered. One would think that the sole purpose of her student exchange to Greece was for her to pull together a body of work that sounds like that. But no — it was all organic and meant to be all at the same time. Life happening alongside art, rather than art being forced out of life.
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