Fousheé: ‘It’s not acceptable for a Black woman to be angry’

For the past eight weeks, US singer-songwriter Britanny Fousheé has been spending her evenings screaming into the faces of filming teens. She is opening on the 24-year-old multi-instrumentalist Steve Lacy’s world tour, giving audiences waiting for a main act who plays R&B and pop a rude awakening.

It’s taken time for Fousheé to be heard like this. “From five years old I knew I had a voice – I could sing and I had something to say, but I needed to convince everyone else first,” she says. “They wanted me to be loud – to sing stronger – but I have a soft approach.”

Speaking over a video call from a sun-filled hotel room the morning after playing a show in Brisbane, Australia, that same softness is present in her voice; it is so gentle it almost registers as a whisper. Traces of its warmth are also threaded throughout her unpredictable career, traversing the finger-picking R&B-folk of her 2021 mixtape Time Machine to now producing a debut album, Softcore, that mixes tender vocals with heavy metal instrumentals and throat-scratching punk screams.

Read the interview in the Guardian.

[This piece was published on 16/12/22]