Lenacha
Self-released
5th September 2025
There’s a yearning for the pastoral running through Lenacha’s debut EP – a reaching for open air – that sits awkwardly, and pointedly, against Greater Manchester’s greyscale architecture. Mysticism opens on “City Life”, where a skeletal, Nick Drake-leaning fingerpicked guitar line underpins a close, unvarnished vocal, the whole thing somewhere between stripped-back folk introspection and the barest outlines of Miseducation demo takes. It’s melancholy without surrendering to miserabilism, and it sketches the EP’s organising logic from the first bar.
The arrangements feel less like minimalism-as-aesthetic and more like someone working with chosen constraints, treating limitation as material. On the third track, the guitars carry the grain of Black Messiah-era D’Angelo but are deployed sparingly, creating negative space rather than the expected density. Earlier, Lenacha’s rework of “How Does It Feel” drags the original’s slow-burn seduction into ambient dub, police sirens slicing through like urban field recordings, smuggled in from the street-level unease that runs through D’Angelo’s “Devils Pie”. It’s a reinterpretation that never attempts to eclipse the source – instead, it asks what remains when you distil a song down to its pulse?
“She Gotta Go Go Go” leans into a kind of bedroom jazz: plonky, irregular piano; a vocal performance that shoulders the weight of departure without theatrics – longing, lust, the logistics of leaving. “Mysticism” is a four-track statement that negotiates desire, loss, and the afterlife within a progressive R&B framework. Space Afrika and Renzniro slot into the existing palette without disturbing its sparseness. The EP is less a showcase of range than a demonstration of how reduction can hold a shape. The pastoral ideal stays distant, but that distance – and the pressure of the city around it – becomes the record’s organising tension.