Freedom is its own kind of discipline. For Shekhinah, South Africa’s most precise vocal architect, the most intentional creative decision she has made in years was to stop being so intentional. Her new single, “Say You Love Me,” a warm, retro-tinted house cut co-written in an unguarded room, arrives not as a career statement but as something rarer, proof that when an artist stops managing themselves, the music starts telling the truth.
The release is the first taste of a four-track experimental house project, and it announces itself quietly. There is no grand declaration of reinvention, no attempt to reclaim territory or correct a narrative.
“It’s just coming from a less pressured place,” she says. “Making music for fun. It was not necessarily an album project or a single that had any expectations. It was just something that was really just true and fun.”
That last word, fun does significant work here. For an artist who has spent her career building some of the most meticulous pop architecture in the South African canon, admitting to lightness is its own kind of courage.
Shekhinah | SUPPLIED
The single was co-written with someone equally fluent in love as subject matter, Brandon Dhludhlu, and that alignment of creative temperament is audible.
“The space that we were in when we wrote the song allowed for the lyrics to feel intentional and informed, and feel all love across,” Shekhinah explains.
The production leans into warmth, a retro house sensibility that rewards the go-with-the-flow energy she brought into the process.
“Let’s give it a retro feel, let’s give it a fun feel because it’s house music,” she recalls of the sessions. “It was more fun than stressful and pressurising.”
The result is a record that sounds exactly like that, loose where her earlier work was structured, open where it was guarded.
But lightness is not the same as shallowness. The single carries a specific emotional maturity that marks it as distinct from her previous explorations of love and longing.
“There’s more clarity in the situation,” she says. “It’s a more evolved perspective, just feeling more, sure in where you stand versus being scared.” She hesitates, reaching for the right language. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just a more confident girl singing about her love, and I think that’s really the difference.”
That confidence isn’t brash or declarative. It simply exists, unhidden, closer to the surface than it has been before.
Shekhinah | SUPPLIED
Working in an unfamiliar genre also prompted something she doesn’t usually do, she went back and listened to herself. Revisiting her earlier projects in the middle of recording, she found something difficult to manufacture, gratitude.
“I understand that there’s an enormous and immense love for making music, and I think there’s endless rhythm and flow inside of me,” she says. “This project just made me fall more in love with the process of making music. They threw me back into a space of like, oh my goodness, I really love what I do.”
The recognition is quiet but significant. Not a rediscovery of passion, but an acknowledgment that it never left.
Undergirding all of it is the creative principle she returns to repeatedly, honesty as the only sustainable infrastructure for a career.
“The more honest you are and real you are, the more relatable you end up being,” she says. “I just try and always represent where I am in life at the moment, or where I’ve come from, or where I’m trying to go.”
Her relationship with her audience is built on this, not audience management, but shared coordinates.
“If I’m in a super lover girl space, that’s what you’re going to hear. If I’m in a super not lover girl space, that’s what you’re going to hear. And I think it relates to who it needs to relate to at different times.”
Shekhinah | SUPPLIED
It sounds simple. It is not. Most artists spend entire careers trying to locate that kind of clarity. The four-track project follows in the coming months. Whether it finds a wide audience or a devoted one, it has already done something valuable for Shekhinah herself, it reminded her that making music and enjoying it are not mutually exclusive. She sounds, for the first time in a while, like someone who has stopped performing the role of artist and started just being one.
