Following up her debut solo EP, Views From The Cut, Aziza Love will release her debut solo album, Bare Soul, later this month.
“Over these years I’ve watched myself choose everything and everyone else first… from people I’ve worked with, intimate relationships, family, friends, lovers,” the former TRIIIBE songstress wrote in an Instagram post announcing the upcoming project. “I lost myself in the search for their happiness. Lost myself in the promises of reciprocity. No more.”
Along with the album’s cover art and release date, Aziza has also shared Bare Soul‘s tracklist. The 10-song album, which is expected to drop on Friday, December 13, will include her previously released song “Smooth Criminal.”
“Bare Soul is a call to action, a reminder to be authentic… Bare Soul is me,” Aziza wrote in another post, calling the project a “declaration of heart thoughts” and her “story, raw and uninhibited.”
Aziza has previously teased snippets of “Baby Steps” via Instagram, which will also land on the upcoming album. Former collaborator Josh Jessen is featured in the record on “True Love,” which was used in Aziza’s short film, Phoenix Rising: Ashes To Ashes.
“Without any formal background in filmmaking, but a relentless need to express my experience, I took on the challenge to learn how to navigate Adobe software to make my visions come to life,” she wrote of the visual on YouTube. “My hope is to create space for black and brown members of the LGBTQA+ community to express genuine emotion, express love, to dance and smile and frown and be free and angry and joyful all in a beautiful way.”
The announcement of the album follows Aziza’s short film and her appearance in standout track “Anytime,” from earlier this year.
TRIIIBE recently won Hip Hop Artist of the Year and Artist of the Year at the 2019 Cincinnati Entertainment Awards. Aziza contributed to the Cincinnati-based group’s latest album, III AM What III AM, and performed at Bunbury Music Festival. Aziza also made a guest appearance on “Anytime,” the standout track from Oski Isaiah’s recent album F*ck A Job.
Find the tracklist and cover art for Aziza Love’s upcoming album, Bare Soul, below.
Cincinnati’s CityBeat hosted the 22nd annual Cincinnati Entertainment Awards at Memorial Hall this Sunday in Over-The-Rhine. The awards ceremony honored the city’s grinding music makers, legends, and up-and-comers.
To kick off the night, the returning Cincinnati Music Ambassador Award – which is awarded to homegrown icons – was renamed the Bootsy Collins Music Ambassador Award in honor of the funk legend, who accepted the honor via video.
The evening, which was hosted by former WNKU music director Aaron Sharpe, also saw several energetic performances from the likes of Maria Carrelli, Bla’szé, Patterns of Chaos, Rock winner Go Go Buffalo, and Multimagic.
As for the awards, TRIIIBE won the coveted Artist of the Year and the Hip Hop awards, with Carriers taking home Album of the Year for Now Is The Time For Loving Me, Yourself & Everyone Else. Other awards included Arlo McKinley for Best Singer/Songwriter, The Tillers for Best Live Act, 500 Miles to Memphis for Best Music Video, and Madqueen for New Artist of the Year.
By genre, Dallas Moore took home the Country star award, Tiger Sex reigned in Punk, The Cliftones won in World / Reggae, Blue Wisp Big Band for Jazz, Lift the Medium for Metal, Freekbass for R&B, Ricky Nye for Blues, Moonbeau for Electronic artist, Bluegrass for the Rumpke Mountain Boys, and Sundae Drives won as Alternative artist.
Although several of the winners – including Rumpke Mountain Boys, Dallas Moore, and Ricky Nye – were either late or absent, the no-shows were due to busy touring and concert scheduling conflicts, which is just a reminder of the active music scene that the CEAs aim to celebrate.
Watch the entire 2019 22nd Annual Cincinnati Entertainments Awards below.
With three very active members in Cincy’s hip-hop community, TRIIIBE always has a lot going on. Aziza Love recently dropped her solo effort Views From The Cut EP, Siri Imani is gearing up to release her debut solo project Therapy project next month, and as a trio they’ve not only been working on new music, but also developing community outreach projects, and credit Cincinnati for stepping up and following them on their musical and philanthropic journey.
After their Bunbury Music Festival set on June 2, members Siri Imani, PXVCE, and Aziza Love opened up about spreading positivity on stage, their individual and group growth, their next album arriving this fall, details on their youth and homeless outreach programs, and the important of investing in their community.
AF: Your set was awesome, really great energy. Siri, I know you have a solo project coming out soon, can you tell me a little bit about it?
Siri: Yeah, it’s called Therapy. It releases on July 19. It definitely just goes into a journey of my life, not only this year, but just everything I’ve been through.
AF: And since it’s your debut solo, how has that been different from your usual group recording?
Siri: It is different. Not too different, because PXVCE is producing pretty much every beat that’s on the project, so it still has the TRIIIBE feel. It has the same vibe and message, but it’s more personal and it’s more specific. Therapy goes into five points and it’s the five stages of healing from PTSD and it goes into different parts of my life that reflect those different stages, leading into the transition of a healthier life and healing.
AF: At your set today, you had everybody repeat: “I love me.” You said, “You are worthy.” You implement that positivity not only into your music, but also in your stage presence. Why are those messages important to you?
Aziza: I feel like healing is its own vibration. Music carries and supports that vibration when we all come together to speak our truths. I think that, in itself, creates the opportunity for community healing. So our music, not only when we perform live, but when we’re in the studio among ourselves performing, we open that space for clear communication and raw expression and that, in itself, can be a release, which supports a healthier state of mind, spirit, and being. So joining with people we’ve never met before in that same space, to invite them to do the same thing, I think is really powerful.
PXVCE: It’s a healing process. It’s a transfer of energy. We are able to get to know the audience [and] the audience is able to get to know us, in a very small amount of time, and it’s a lot of our first impressions for a lot of people, so in order for us to relay our message I think it’s powerful to have it received so easily. Words are very powerful; vibrations are very powerful. With us saying, ‘We love you, we love ourselves,’ I think it is very healing.
TRIIIBE performing at Bunbury on June 2, 2019. Photos by Victoria Moorwood.
AF: Siri, you’ve got a solo project coming out. Aziza, you just released your Views From The Cut EP. Is TRIIIBE recording anything together at the moment?
Siri: Oh yeah. Our last album came out on 10/10, our next album comes out 10/10.
PXVCE: We’re about to make it like a ceremonial thing.
AF: What stage is the project in?
Aziza: We’re in a transformative stage because it’s a mixture of writing, recording, reconnecting. We’re setting our focus to our philanthropic side and all that we do. Especially seeing all what’s been happening in Dayton right now, reconfiguring in general with one how we’re operating in Cincinnati and how we’re operating elsewhere and how we can help on a more grand scale. We’re in a transformative state in our music because it reflects our work in the community as well.
Siri: It reflects the project. III Am What III Am was last year. That was us literally showing who we were. III Am What III Wanna Be is showing what we want to be, that’s musically, physically, in reality and all. It’s all a process and we’re playing with different styles. We all bring different things to the table and us figuring out how to leverage that is the key toward III Am What III Wanna Be.
AF: What philanthropic projects are you currently working on?
Siri: Potluck For The People is for people experiencing displacement, homelessness, and that’s every final Sunday from 12 to 5 [p.m.] and Raising The Barz is every first and third Thursday at the public library. That is an Intro To Hip Hop class for the youth, we’ve got as young as 6-year-olds and as old as 30. We invite local artists and local students to help themselves get better with hip hop or any craft they want to work with.
AF: Most Cincinnati artists I’ve spoken with credit you to bringing togetherness and acceptance in the hip hop scene here.
Aziza: Really!?
Siri: Wow.
Aziza: That’s so beautiful.
AF: Do you guys feel a little bit of pressure with that recognition or has this just been your natural progression?
Siri: We curate spaces, but we can curate a space and nobody shows up. The people genuinely wanted to connect and taking the time to do it makes this work. Without anybody supporting, we’d just be three people trying to do something. This is something that the city wants and the city made it happen and it’s not just the credit to us, it’s never just the credit to us. That’s the whole point of TRIIIBE, it’s understanding that we are doing this. It’s one big machine and without any of us playing our part it wouldn’t work out.
PXVCE: When you look at Atlanta or Chicago, who have huge underground scenes, many people can become catalysts for some of those movements, but to take the credit completely, it just doesn’t make sense because if not everyone is participating then you can’t even say that.
AF: It’s a give and take.
Aziza: It’s a unified decision to make change.
Siri: I’m definitely proud to be one of the holders of the idea… but the city and the people are the catalysts of it.
Aziza: We’re not the first. And we’re not the last.
TRIIIBE‘s Siri Imani called out Cincinnati gentrification in her new “513” she-mix of Drake and BlocBoy JB’s 2018 hit, “Look Alive.” The addictive beat of the track puts it on instant replay as Siri brings light to the inequality and displacement currently affecting those in Cincinnati’s downtown Over-The-Rhine area.
TRIIIBE is no stranger to spotlighting – and helping to fix – societal challenges in their city.
“I haven’t lived in OTR my whole life; however, I’ve always went to school there and have countless friends and family,” says Imani. “Gentrification has shaped a lot of the community that was once inhabited by generations of families that grew up there.”
In the past decade, herds of new businesses have moved into the downtown area, providing retail and local eateries, but skyrocketing rental prices and chipping away at long-grown culture. Imani and her two TRIIIBE counterparts often dedicate their art to opening an honest dialogue within their community, and Imani doesn’t plan to stop with “513.”
“Music is universal and to me. It’s a more efficient way of getting my messages out,” she says. “We listen to, and memorize, songs better than we do the words actually spoken to us. Music resonates and evokes feelings on a level that can be hard to match verbally.”
As for remixing such a repeatable hit, Imani did that deliberately, too.
“All of the she-mixes use well known, male-dominated songs,” she says. “‘Look Alive’ was big last year and I needed something people could easily compare lyrics to.”
The Cincinnati songstress is currently working on her debut solo EP, Therapy, set to drop July 19. She, along with TRIIIBE, will also be performing at Bunbury Music Festival on Sunday, June 2.
Aziza Love, one-third of Cincinnati hip hop group TRIIIBE, released her debut solo project, Views From The Cut, earlier this month. Aziza gracefully balance rapping, singing, and spoken word – a style she’s honed in her previous work with the group. Although brief, the four-song EP powerfully reverberates self-worth and makes an impact as an artistic extension of the activist, singer, and TRIIIBE member herself.
“Phoenix Rising” launches the EP off to a bold start with Aziza manifesting her own self-worth and demanding that other women do the same. “You a bad bitch and you’re beautiful / You are much more than usual / Don’t you dare wait ’til your funeral / To give ’em all a reason to acknowedge / That your essence is a blessing / Girl, you better see it as a lesson,” she sings.
Chase Watkins’ production really gets going on the next song, “Spiritus Scronk,” featuring Josh Jessen, and Aziza plays with different vocal tones, pitches and singing styles. But her energy truly peaks in the Devin Burgess-mixed “Shemix” of Cardi B’s “Backing It Up.” Aziza raps non-stop and claims ownership of her sexuality and attitude in the new empowering remix of the already catchy single. She bounces effortlessly along the jingling beat with words of fully-realized confidence and self-worth.
The overall lyrical content of the project contains an important lesson. While TRIIIBE is known for their charitable actions and giving back to their community, Views From The Cut‘s themes of reflection and self-love show that to invest in each other we must also invest in ourselves. Outward love and compassion are themes TRIIIBE commonly portrays in their music, but with Aziza’s solo project, we see that glimpsing inward and owning one’s independent process and worth is equally important.
TRIIIBE will be performing at Bunbury next month and Aziza says visuals for Views From The Cut are coming soon.
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