MNEK is a musical polymath, able to translate perception, feeling, and mood into singular recordings and formal bodies of work utilising his instincts. “I’m nuanced, it’s not descript at times. I create for myself and for others,” he says. As a songwriter, producer, and front-of-house artist, MNEK has traversed the music industry since his mid-teens, his curiosity for the artform converged with the advent of social media — a catalyst for his migration into his vocation. Raised on a varied diet composed of Mariah Carey, The Sugababes, Spice Girls, Whitney Houston, Mis-Teeq, David Morales, his ear grew wedded to a miscellany of genres, regions, and sounds. “One minute it would be 90s R&B, then 2000s dance records, I wasn’t tied to any one thing and that was refreshing.”
Learning on the job, MNEK was ushered into the music industry aged 14, after releases he’d placed on MySpace in his spare time, got discovered, first by Anita Blay and then industry publishers at large. “It was all so new to me, of course I didn’t know some of the structure and how publishing or credits worked at the start,” he explains. But learning on the job would come natural to him as his career took off as a singer-songwriter. From seminal UK pop-records like The Saturdays “All Fired Up”, to the dance-infused, Duke Dumont and A*M*E-fronted, platinum release “Need You (100%)”, MNEK began making an imprint on an array of genres nationwide, his eclectic nature still imbuing itself into his formal career. “When I got to work with Rudimental, going on tour with them, I got to learn how a genre like dance works — how to perform it, how audiences react. I got such specific and different experiences,” he says.
Fronting releases like “Ready For Your Love”, he would go on to set the foundations for his own solo success. “At the time, it was a mix of me finding my feet as an artist, and solidifying myself as a songwriter,” MNEK clarifies. But it was the anthemic, emotive collaboration “Never Forget You” that broke not just himself, but frequent collaborator Zara Larsson simultaneously. A sentinel blend of euphoria and melancholy, the emotive release captured the world the quirk in its synths hypnotising a global legion of ears. A top 30 success across the UK, US, and a wide cross section of European markets. His global resonance would all but continue in successive solo and songwriting releases including the urgent Beyonce single “Hold Up”. “It’s crazy where my pen has been able to take me,” he reflects.
MNEK’s solo-work is marked by its ability to shapeshift and contort what conventional genres mean — it’s an embodiment of his wide palette of influence and tenacity as a worldbuilder. Small Talk, his inaugural EP, for example is able to infuse dance with funk (Every Little Word, In Your Clouds), soul (More Than A Miracle), and R&B (Suddenly). Its ambition is tightly weaved to the talent’s debut album Language, which not only ups the ante, but the audacity. Locomiting the likes of fickle situationships, identity, sex, queerness, and self-love, MNEK sheds his skin, with Uzoechi Emenike entering the fore, the human behind the music finally articulating his reality. “It’s a lot in this industry, being a Black, south-London, queer man,” MNEK reflects. Still numbers like “Correct” shatter this self doubt, MNEK “feeling himself” throughout the elastic album-cut. Elsewhere, cult-classics like “Girlfriend” divulge on the underworld of DL culture, atop vintage R&B and UKG soundscapes, while the resonant “Honeymoon Phaze” acknowledges the fantasy that is a temporal relationship. Scoring an array of critical success from the likes of Billboard and PAPER, MNEK went on to tour Language across the UK and US. “Seeing people, particularly stateside come out of their house for me, gave me confidence in the record and what I’d created. I needed to see those reactions at the time.”
Proving that he could not only craft complete albums for himself, MNEK went on to executive produce British girl group, FLO’s debut album Access All Areas (AAA), alongside Zara Larsson’s comeback LP Midnight Sun fulfilling a career-dream. “I’ve always wanted to, beginning to end, put together a project for another artist, and I’m so blessed all of the girls trusted me with their vision,” he notes. Called the unofficial fourth member across FLO’s debut era, AAA earned the quartet a Grammy-nomination last year for Best Progressive R&B Album; simultaneously Midnight Sun’s eponymous single scored a Best Dance Performance shortlisting. “There’s an ecosystem of non-Americans now, able to break through and really build something beyond their home countries now,” MNEK shares. “Zara, FLO, there’s a lot of people able to do it, and in Zara’s case, do it again.”
This all but sets the stage for Uzoechi Emenike’s formal return to the spotlight. It’s come after years of deep introspection and self-soothing. “There were periods where I had to re-build my sense of confidence,” he admits. Aptly titled BULLDOZER!!, the album is an embodiment of MNEK’s career to date — circumventing traditional structures, rules or perceptions and succeeding on one’s own terms. “I’m confident in what I’m doing, I’m taking up space, I bulldoze into rooms,” MNEK reveals. “It’s so important and pertinent to the songs I’ve created, it was ideated before the name even came to me.” Initially afraid of the word, MNEK decided to embody his fear of it, anchoring it to his second album, boldly embracing the dynamism of the phrase. “It is true to who I am, my presence,” he admits.
Loud, playful, tender, and audacious BULLDOZER!! boldly showcases Uzo’s ruminations as a 30-year-old. A “REVERSE!!” and its “POW”-laced sample indicative of his strong additions to the canon of Black British music, “LADY!!” a symposium on contemporary masculinity and queerness, juxtaposed with an “OH NO!! ALL THE BOYS!!” which serves as an unapologetic embrace of MNEK’s past, melancholic in the lessons it bestows on the listener. On his sophomore, MNEK is acutely aware of who he is. “It’s my most certain piece of work,” he says. With a career’s worth of experience (and success) under his belt and a horde of intersectional listeners that cross continents, identities, and generations, Uzoechi Emenike firmly articulates to the world that he’s not just ready to radiate once more, but that he was destined to.
