This story is taken from the winter 2023 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.
It’s only right that Cleo Sol should have chosen a surname that sounds like ‘soul’ but translates, from Spanish, to ‘sun’. Her voice is warm, airy and bright. Her tone is soft and mellifluous. Her public presence, like that glowing ball of plasma, is underscored by long stretches of absence or self-effacement. She can conjure Sunday mornings from a lilting string arrangement, can evoke, from a plaintive piano melody, sunlight across hardwood floors, a spoonful of honey, the feeling of sinking into a hug from an old friend – or, maybe, into a confessional booth. Often we encounter the singer in medias res, appealing to her God in the face of spiritual crisis: “Release me from this pride / Turn anger into peace and lead with my inner child,” she pleads sweetly on “Self”, her voice light and feathery over a jazzy bassline. Really, Sol has a way of reupholstering the listening room, of making you feel like you’re intruding on something private, something intimate. Like you’re looking over her shoulder while she scribbles into a diary, purging self-doubt or improvising bits of scripture. Are these R&B songs, pulpit testimonials or therapy sessions? What does it mean if they’re all three at once?
What does it mean if Sol totally rejects the industry script, if she forgoes the write-release-tour model that everything was founded on and chooses, instead, to give away two albums, with little to no promotion, as the leaves change colour and begin their slow descents? What does it say about her ethic and self-conception that she almost always declines interviews, that she has never (until now) appeared on a magazine cover, that her discography, which spans a quartet of solo projects and 11 SAULT albums in four years, has no official trace of exegesis? It’s rare to find such a prolific musical enigma so disinterested in the trappings of the musical rat race, so sure of her own gravitational pull. Sade, to whom Sol’s smooth timbre is most often compared, was nicknamed Howie by her friends after the famously hermetic Howard Hughes, for her well-mythologised tendency to avoid the spotlight. Sol, similarly, privileges her art above all else, and has perhaps decided it says far more about her than she ever could.
And anyway, sometimes there isn’t much to say, because inspiration strikes like lightning and the artist is just a conduit for whatever message she’s absorbed from the heavens. Which seems to be the case for Sol, whose music is dusted with a shimmering patina of faith. “There isn’t a process” for her songwriting, she told MTV in a rare interview back in 2019. “It’s always about being open and letting God work through me at any moment.” Though she was reticent to have a reporter interview her for this story, Sol was keen to open up about her creative process with her closest collaborator: Inflo, the multi-instrumentalist behind SAULT to whom she is now married with a child, and who has produced all of her albums. Their partnership, it turns out, is the primary well of inspiration that her music springs from – the only reason, in fact, that she’s still making music at all. “Having control and letting go of control – you would remind me of the joys of music when I didn’t enjoy the creative process at the time,” she confides, referencing the period between 2013 and 2017 when she stopped releasing tracks. “I let go of limiting beliefs about myself... Music to me is true joy, happiness; it’s feeling and it’s very spiritual. Making music with you is a dream come true.”
The difference between her and other mysterious, reclusive musicians, those who have made an art of prolonged absence (Sade, Lauryn Hill, D’Angelo), is that her supply of musical matter is seemingly inexhaustible, as if the only way she knows how to be in the world is through parcelling out bright, taut glimmers of advice, reflections on her spiritual development, and veiled takes on romance, friendship and motherhood. Always, her voice is soothing and medicinal, laced with wisdom and affirmation. “Could it be that you got stuck in someone else’s dream?” she sings on “Build Me Up”, one of several crystalline songs from her second album, Mother (2021), about lessons learned and unlearned through parenthood. “You tried so hard to fight the rain / that you missed the sea.” I asked a friend of mine, a young mother of two kids, how the music makes her feel. She said it’s “like the one deep breath you’re able to catch throughout the day – or a reminder of the silver lining that lights the darkest parts of our psyche, and an affirmation of the soft landing that follows.” It’s not always clear whether Sol’s consolations are directed at herself, the flickering mirage of a parent, or if the listener has instinctively syphoned them, by way of headphones, to fund their own personal healing. But, as they say, if the glass slipper fits...
Heaven and Gold, her third and fourth LPs, arrived two weeks apart in September, the first announced with a modest tweet and the second materialising by surprise. Where her debut, 2020’s Rose in the Dark, and Mother were slow-burning and delicate, Heaven and Gold are warmer and more sonically ambitious, like groovier, more confident expansions on a blueprint. Each is imbued with a tender, searching blend of contemporary jazz and vintage soul, like she’s telegraphing delicate hymns and lullabies from Studio A at Electric Lady, with Erykah Badu, Stevie Wonder and Minnie Riperton in the room. There are the usual blushes of neo-soul, as always – “Heaven”, the swampy title track, sounds cut from the same fabric as D’Angelo’s Voodoo – but there are also balmy touches of dub and reggae, blithe forays into bossa nova, and the gentle comforts of gospel. Her songs feel like companions for moments of uncertainty, snatches of sharp wisdom from a friend who occasionally reads you with love. “Looking at him like he’s a God figure / Maybe you just need a father figure,” she sings on “Miss Romantic”. Which is another way of deploying that wise, ancient refrain: Girl. Other times, she’ll employ the sort of gentle repetition that feels devotional, a prayer for the times when saying it once isn’t enough to make yourself believe it: “There will be no crying / There will be no crying / There will be no crying,” she urges on the opener to Gold. “The light, it covers me.”
Sol was born Cleopatra Zvezdana Nikolic in 1990, to a Jamaican father and a Spanish-Serbian mother who met in a jazz band. Her dad played the bass and piano; her mum sang and played the flute and guitar. There’s an old last.fm bio that says it was her mother who gave her the old karaoke player that she eventually used to start writing songs, and that Sol “quickly became the singer in the family, jostling for attention amongst seven other siblings.” She started singing at youth clubs, then uploading songs to Myspace and, in 2008, she was on the chorus of Tinie Tempah’s track “Tears”. Suddenly it was 2011 and she had a record deal from a major label that fit like an itchy sweater. The songs she was making were shades more mainstream-pop-oriented than her musical education had been, different from the old reggae, salsa and Motown soul records her parents used to play, and whatever project she finished recording while she was signed there didn’t fit quite right, either; she chose to leave it on the shelf. Two years after she’d started gaining momentum in the UK’s crowded music scene, Sol decided, likely against the judgment of those around her, to hit pause on her career.
And what becomes a true star most, anyway? Is it her appearances, or the suspense generated when she chooses not to show up? It wasn’t until 2017, says Sol, when she started working with Inflo, that she found the music that felt right to her. “What do you feel made you stop your career in 2012/2013? What parts of yourself do you feel you kept and let go of in order for you to evolve?” Inflo asks his partner in their conversation for this story. “I wasn’t happy,” she admits, plainly. “And I was attaching my happiness to my music, so I wanted to quit music completely. Which still makes me sad when I think about it.” For four years, she retired from music entirely. “I wasn’t being true to myself,” the singer confides, “and I was listening to everyone else’s advice on my career other than myself. I had lost faith in myself. I didn’t know how to pick myself up again.”
The first time I heard Sol’s voice, sometime in 2019, I didn’t realise it was Cleo Sol. Her name was nowhere to be found. The song was “Masterpiece”, from an album called 5, but the tracks were all attributed to a faceless band called SAULT, and there was no way to discern who was who in the constellation of voices that growled, harmonised or smouldered under Inflo’s dusty, distorting filters. Everyone was all tangled up with each other. Choirs abounded. And here was this sweet, nimbus voice gliding over sinuous, dubby grooves that resembled something like post-post funk – playful, experimental arrangements that hewed closer to ESG than to anything in the ascendant strain of R&B music at the time. It was Afrobeat, reggae, Motown. It was disco, psych-funk, gospel. There was a running joke at the time that R&B was dying because the kids didn’t go to church anymore, so the music had been evacuated of all its essence. Not the first time, it should be said, that a generation was accused of taking the soul out of soul music. But here was this anonymous group and their humid, Godward anthems, whose rhythm-focused soundscapes seemed to worship the longue durée of Black diasporic sound. Critics reactively christened it ‘alternative R&B’, and while it’s not not that, the broadness and imprecision of that term failed to capture the musical histories it engaged and the easy fluidity with which the songs seemed to move.
The songs travelled seamlessly through storied traditions of Black dance music, but they could also be frustrated and world-weary, even intensely political. If those woozy first records show flashes of melancholia and social consciousness – “Every day is an ongoing massacre,” Sol sings on “Living in America”, “Everyone has a gun / Counting bullets like they’re Haribos” – then the later albums are outright protest music. Untitled (Black Is), released on Juneteenth in 2020, opens with a Black Panthers chant. “Uncomfortable”, released on Untitled (Rise) just three months later, starts gravely: “How do you turn hate to love?” Sol asks. “Why do you keep shooting us?” They can be rough and confrontational, with synths and guitars so fuzzy it was like someone had blown the amps. Still, the airiness of Sol’s delivery paired with Inflo’s gorgeous, sumptuous melodies have a way of lulling you into a kind of danceable militance, an acknowledgment that pleasure and pain are ever-overlapping, that joy and resistance are mutually reinforcing. Near the end of Untitled (Rise), there’s a spoken-word intro that, upon hearing it for the first time, made me break into laughter. “I see you over by the water cooler on your break talking ’bout, ‘Tanisha, your mental health is super important to me,’” a woman says, her eye-rolling audible. “But you know it ain’t.” The humour in the midst of so much seriousness, the heaviness undercut by optimism and levity, feels like that reminder from the American writer Toni Cade Bambara: that the role of the artist is “to make revolution irresistible”.
Of course, SAULT is borrowing from a seductive playbook. There are (probably white) people who were once so hypnotised by Marvin Gaye’s sweet falsetto, that deep gospel-toned growl, that it may never have occurred to them that What’s Going On was inspired by Gaye’s brother, Frankie, who returned home after serving three years in the Vietnam war and brought back the same violence that drafted him there in the first place. Stevie Wonder’s trademark sunny optimism was, similarly, often juxtaposed with full-blown anti-war tracks, and that tension is one of the main reasons Sol fell in love with him in the first place. Protest, history tells us, is at the heart of soul music. Sol’s solo offerings clearly outline a more personal kind of revolution – of the spirit, of the self. It’s gentler, and maybe less politicised. But if the rhetorical capacity of certain slogans can begin to feel pushed to their limits and beyond the threshold of exhaustion, Sol might lean in to whisper, instead, a secret: “Love will lead you there / Love will lead you there / Love will lead you there.”
Cleo and Inflo’s conversation follows below
Inflo: What’s your first memory of feeling true joy?
Cleo Sol: I remember starting year 7, putting my outfit out the night before and walking by myself to school in the morning feeling really excited about my newfound independence.
I: And when did you realise you have to become the person you want to see in the world?
CS: I couldn’t find her anywhere so I stopped looking outside of myself and finally found myself. It sounds cheesy but it also slyly makes me want to cry.
I: What do you love about yourself?
CS: I love my childlike spirit.
I: You are the most genuine soul I know. What are some of your tips for remaining [true to] yourself, keeping your peace and not getting triggered by past experiences?
CS: That is so kind, babe. It means a lot, thank you. Try to be understanding and forgiving of yourself. Every day is a blessing and another opportunity to start again. I definitely still get triggered now and again, but I try and work through them. Keyword: try.
I: What do you look for in a friend?
CS: I look for kindness, respect and lots of laughter. Someone with whom I can truly be my silliest self.
I: What’s your favourite thing to do outside of creating music?
CS: Spending quality time with my family in Jamaica. Dancing, walking and trying out new food places.
I: What’s your favourite place to eat?
CS: Easy: A.Wong in Victoria. It’s the best Chinese. Andrew and Nathalie and the team are amazing! A dream.
“Try to be understanding and forgiving of yourself. Every day is a blessing and another opportunity to start again” – Cleo Sol
I: You have the most respectful fans; when we walk around they approach you with kindness in a calm way. Now that more people are being exposed to your greatness and light, does it change anything for you?
CS: They really are the best! No gas, amazing spirits! I feel so lucky and blessed. I still walk around London every day talking to people, getting my coffee on my errands, and being inspired; it feels like I’m floating sometimes.
I: What do you do on days there is nothing to do?
CS: Try to do nothing, although you know that’s not the case, and I love that you’re always encouraging me to chill, sleep, rest etc but sometimes my Aries spirit wants to do everything at once. But I am learning to cool off and chill. I’m proper good at chilling when it comes down to it.
I: What made you stop your career in 2012/13 and which parts of yourself do you feel you kept and let go of in order to evolve?
CS: It’s all a blur now as the years kind of merged into each other and I didn’t really know what I was doing in my life. I wasn’t happy and I was attaching my happiness to my music, so I wanted to quit music completely, which still makes me feel sad when I think about it. I wasn’t being true to myself and I was listening to everyone else’s advice on my career other than myself. I had lost faith in myself and I didn’t know how to pick myself up again. Meeting you was from God, I know this. I honestly feel like you were the only person who believed in me – you would encourage me to create all the time, even when most times I didn’t want to. We spoke about God a lot and what his path was for me/us, why I was being led on this path and why I was so obsessed with making sense of it all – why did we meet at this time? Having control and letting go of control – you would remind me of the joys of music when I didn’t enjoy the creative process at the time, at all. I let go of limiting beliefs about myself. And I’ve kept my excitement about music and my love for it; I’m always exploring and finding inspiration almost every day and that’s something I’ve always held on to. Music to me is true joy, happiness; it’s feeling and it’s very spiritual.
I: You then made Rose in the Dark, your debut album! Whoop! I was determined to help you see it through as I had gained some experience in failing and succeeding in the album-making process beforehand – I’d learned that the key was to commit to the end, no matter what. What was this experience like and how was the process for you?
CS: OMG, what joy! And to make it with you made it extra special; I was so excited to put something out into the world that was 100 per cent honestly me. You definitely pushed me to go there, you just said, ‘Cleo, speak your truth’ and I was like, ‘say no more’ and that still rings in my head to this day! I’ve promised myself to always keep it 100; it gives me peace being honest and knowing that others relate and we’re all sort of on these similar journeys with different lives; [it’s] fascinating to me. Making music with you is a dream come true; I’m so grateful we’re on this cool journey together doing up life.
Hair JORDAN BRUMANT using SACHAJUAN, make-up SABA KHAN at THE FACE FAIRY using HOURGLASS COSMETICS, nails SAFFRON GODDARD at CLM using DIOR MANICURE COLLECTION LE BAUME and DIOR VERNIS, photographic assistants DYLAN MASSARA, BEATRIZ GONÇALVES, styling assistants CHARLOTTE GHESQUIERE, RAPHAEL DEL BONO, LEONIE DENNETT, AYUMI TANEICHI, production CEBE STUDIO, post-production ICE STUDIOS, runner JAMES ROGERS