One to watch: BLESSED - "We're not ballad queens"

Sister duo BLESSED – South Londoners Loz and Gigi Morgan – are at that exciting point in a new act’s journey where the sound, aesthetic and style have all been figured out, meaning they can focus on turning out some bops.

Their debut EP, II Blessed, is wall-to-wall with them. Slick but cheeky lyrics, old school R&B but with modern flourishes and hypnotic harmonies are what they’re all about – demonstrated perfectly in their recent single Love Me. We phoned the pair up to find out more.

BLESSED are all about uplifting music.

Loz: “The reaction to Love Me has actually been mad. Our sound is definitely a fusion of pop and R&B with Caribbean flavour. We really like gospel sounds at the moment, production-wise, so our music is really just a mix of all those sounds. Gospel is uplifting, and that’s what we want to do with our music.

Gigi: “Last year and this year have been hard for us. We’ve been struggling with anxiety, and the music industry is hard. Love Me was the first song we created that we came back to every day after we’d made it. It was like therapy for us – that was the first time it really clicked with us that this is how we want to make people feel with our music. Going forward, our music and sound is going to have a positive message.”

They were both almost in a girlband.

Gigi: “It’s funny because growing up, there’s a two-and-a-half-year gap between us, so we weren’t always the best friends that we’ve become now. We first did our own thing, I was in a band, Loz was singing solo. Then Loz’s manager wanted to put a girlband together and Lauren suggested me – it was the perfect time to suggest it because we’d just found our real friendship together as sisters. It was either going to be amazing or go really badly. I’m so happy we’ve gone for it - because we’re so in sync, working together is so easy.”

They first released music in 2017 but decided to reboot completely this year.

Loz: “We had music before, but this is a total restart. We just wanted to be fresh. The songs that we put out before were literally the first songs we ever wrote together. We’ve come such a long way in knowing exactly who we are, so we wanted a fresh, clean start. It’s not that we’re not proud of those older songs, they just don’t really fit in with our sound now.”

Gigi: “We’ve since signed to Island and have spent the last couple of years figuring out our sound, working with different produced. We released Love Me through GRM Daily, which we were apprehensive about at first because people obviously go on GRM to see grime, but the comments have been so positive.”

Don’t expect many ballads from them.

Lauren: “We both love music that’s uptempo. We’re not ballad queens. We do like them, but we tend to go to music to lift our mood. Lizzo is someone who really inspires us for that reason. Growing up, we listened to a lot of Joe, Usher, Donnell Jones. We listen to a lot of Ciara and Christina Aguilera – there’s a big female empowerment vibe to the music we listen to.”

Listen to II BLESSED below: