When Akeeda arrives on stage for the first edition of this year’s After Dark at the Two Oceans Aquarium, she does so softly — but her presence screams. She has your attention before she’s sung a single note. When she does eventually make a sound, it is to place you carefully within the fabric of her and her creative partner Andre’s universe, introducing their music with the same barebones honesty that shapes the duo’s songwriting. Then, she sings — and everything else disappears. Standing in front of the immense fish tank in the auditorium of the I&J Ocean Exhibit, Akeeda becomes a siren. But her song isn’t one that lures you to drowning — the opposite, actually. It shows you that you can breathe underwater.
Akeeda and Andre have been making music together for around 15 years, having met at school and eventually becoming part of a four-piece rock band with other musicians from Cape Town’s Southern Suburbs. They played together for years before the band gradually changed shape, leaving the two of them to figure out what their music could sound like with just the two of them. “We changed our sound a lot to accommodate for that because now we’re literally just guitar and vocal,” Akeeda explains.
It wasn’t necessarily the plan, but the stripped-back arrangement naturally pulled them towards indie folk and singer-songwriter territory. The obvious tension here is intriguing. The duo’s minimalist, guitar-and-vocals indie-folk style is synonymous with a particular cultural iconography: the sad white woman. But Akeeda is a woman of colour. She is queer. And, importantly, she is making deeply personal music without trying to make that personality palatable.
Necessity, in this case, became a kind of creative permission, with the stripped-back formula allowing Akeeda to express her internal monologue at its most authentic. “I realise I’ve actually been quite spoiled in that way,” she says when I ask about her songwriting process, curious to know if her internal monologue speaks in folk music. “I’m used to a song coming out almost in its full form immediately.” The result is something that feels almost like a reclamation of the genre on its own terms. Her songs aren’t trying to sound like folk music. They sound like Akeeda, and folk happens to be the language that gave her the room to say what she needed to say.
With only guitar and voice, there isn’t much space to hide, and she’s only recently had to learn how to sit with an idea when it doesn’t immediately reveal itself. “I can sometimes get quite frustrated when the song doesn’t come out in the way I want,” she says. “And then I’m like, oh, fuck — that song’s not meant to be like that, and I move on from it too quikcly. But now I’ve formed a creative process for myself, and I’ve learned to sit down with an idea.”
The immediacy of how she and Andre go about making music together is part of what makes these songs feel so intimate. Akeeda doesn’t write as a constructed version of herself, or perform vulnerability. She’s just honest. When she and Andre perform together, it creates the feeling of two people sitting down and actually talking. “I want it to feel like it’s a conversation, like we’re in a DMC, like we’re friends and we’re having this chat and we’re both feeling the same way,” she tells me.
That instinct has translated directly into her songwriting. “I think that curiosity in the way that I engage with people comes through very easily in my music, because I’m writing not only to process my own feelings, but also in a very relatable way with an audience,” she says. In essence, she writes the way she talks. “I generally like to talk and connect with people. I can talk shit, but I don’t generally talk shit with people. I talk about very human things.”
Take a song like “Expiry”, for example, where Akeeda sings about a normal part of the queer experience that often goes unspoken. It came from a moment of intimacy that Akeeda recalls almost like a photograph. “We’re literally laying in bed,” she tells me. “And we’re having a pillow talk moment. And she’s telling me about her hopes and dreams.” Akeeda realised that their lives were ultimately going to diverge. They had reached their expiry.
“And I’m sitting there realising that the whole thing is also, like, very queer.” It was early in Akeeda’s own queer experience, and the song captures that surreal moment where something is real while you are simultaneously beginning to understand that it no longer exists. “Both ‘Fucking Games’ and ‘Expiry’ are about the same person, actually,” Akeeda says. “I was in a four-year toxic relationship, willingly so though. But it gave me some really good perspective and songs.”
There is something radical about a woman of colour being this honest without sanding off the edges. So much of the vocabulary we’ve learned to read as ‘emotionally earnest’ in music has historically given white artists more space to be messy, introspective, sexually complicated, heartbroken or uncertain. Akeeda doesn’t seem particularly interested in asking whether she’s allowed to occupy that space. She just does. Even the playfulness of “Expiry”, with its layered harmonies and backing vocals, came from allowing herself to experiment with a part of her voice that she considers her most vulnerable.
Akeeda’s musical upbringing was anything but singular. “I grew up in that very nice sweet spot in, like, late ’90s, early 2000s,” she shares. “My dad was a musician as well. He played bass, I think, and he sang. We weren’t generally like a jazz household. We were like a rock music household, and mainstream pop.” She grew up listening to everything from alternative music and heavy metal to rave and trance. Her friendships have continued that same kind of musical cross-pollination, moving between indie and alternative music and nights spent dancing. “I find that I am quite explorative,” she says. “My ear wants to listen to a lot of different types of things.”
That curiosity to play outside the lines of Akeeda’s debut EP, I Forget Myself, is becoming increasingly important as she and Andre look towards what’s next. After spending years carrying the collection of songs that eventually became I Forget Myself, Akeeda is ready to close that chapter and allow herself to make something else. “It’s scary and exciting at the same time,” she tells me. “I think initially it was a bit daunting. I’m not someone who likes change. I love being on the other side of change, but going through the tunnel is the scariest, most destabilising.”
They don’t know exactly what it will sound like yet. “It might be indie electronica, maybe like a little hyperpop moment,” she says with a glint of mischief in her eyes. “We want to continue to shape-shift,” she says. “We’ve already shown that we can. I’m at a point spiritually where I’m ready to put these songs down so that I can kind of move on to something else.”
Genre has never really been the point. In this case, it was a circumstance that became a sound, and then a language. Now that language has given her a place to speak from, and Akeeda wants to know how far she can stretch the borders. “Andre and I are both people of colour, and I think this intersectionality is often missed,” she says. “When you’re a person of colour and you’re put in a room that you didn’t have access to before, you don’t know what you can and can’t do. And now that we’re in the room, we’re piecing things together, and it’s kind of fueling the creative process a little bit more.”
Perhaps the real freedom Akeeda found in Folk was not a genre to belong to, but a current to swim through. And now that she’s beneath the surface, she’s ready to see what else is down there, even if it’s something she hasn’t found a name for yet.
Photographs (except cover) by Laura McCullagh.
