In a hotel room in Lagos, one bottle of MG Spirit down, Dreamer Isioma makes a confession: they’re a bit of a stan. “I love Ice Spice so, so much. Also, she’s Nigerian like me, a little bit. So, that’s basically my cousin.” The Chicago-based artist is giddy — their partner Nina Tech shares a festival billing with the “Princess Diana” rapper on the first day of this year’s Summer Smash. The stakes are high for a meet-cute, especially when it could potentially culminate in a TikTok-rending musical collaboration. Of course, Dreamer is booked and busy in their own right this gig season, set to embark on a month-long cross-country tour in May, taking Princess Forever, their vibey new R&B concept album, through 20 different cities, from Minneapolis to Texas to Toronto.
The record sees the 22-year-old nonbinary musician (who uses both they and he pronouns) embrace femme-leaning aesthetics as the titular Princess Forever, drawing on their experiences as a transmasculine person who was once perceived as a woman. To Dreamer, being a princess “just means being fabulous. Fabulous, at a certain high status, and being a good model for the people around you.” The album’s press notes describe Princess Forever as “an extension of Dreamer,” a rebel leader character working against the “oppressive institutions that rule his home planet.” Though, when asked to elaborate, they mention “governmental states that are stealing resources and improperly using funds” and “societal leaders [who] deliberately put down on marginalised groups” — “I’m really just talking about people who suck,” Dreamer says. “I hate people who suck, so I made them the villain of this album.”
A few of these frustrations are aired on “Fuck Tha World”, the album’s grimacing fourth track: “Saying fuck the world brings me inner peace / It’s all gonna blow up anyways / We’re all gonna float to outer space.” The song is a sort of spiritual successor to Dreamer’s deliciously profane breakout track, the 2020 TikTok anthem “Sensitive”: “I’m switching up, I’m a boss, I’m getting mean,” sings Dreamer, manifesting their career highs to come. Princess Forever, Dreamer says, represents a musical “levelling up” for them as an artist. Since releasing their debut album Goodnight Dreamer, performing with the likes of Flo Milli and Pharrell, and joining forces with their band The Celestials, they say: “I’ve learned a lot about music theory and the way that instruments work. I’m always very involved in the production process, but this time around I was extremely involved — at every single session, very much on the computer.”
How do they think the new album might be received by listeners? “For my wallet, I hope people are playing this out loud with their friends. But this is a very intimate album at its core. It’s a love album, powered by revolutionary love.” Mixing anime, Afrosurrealism and countless musical influences (notably “a lot of Erykah Badu and a lot of Tyler, the Creator”) across 13 tracks, Princess Forever is a smooth, multi-genre triumph. “Call Me If You Get Lost came out around the time I was first conceptualising it,” Dreamer says. As well as becoming obsessed with books by celebrated sci-fi writer Octavia E. Butler, they did a major deep dive into Afrofuturism too.
“That’s how I found out who Sun Ra was,” they tell us. Also known as Le Sony’r Ra, the experimental jazz visionary’s body of work comprised an Astro-Black mythology, “a way of aligning the history of ancient Egypt with a vision of a future human exodus beyond the stars”. The enigmatic artist posited this as a path for the world to recover from American slavery and other collective traumas. “When I read about him I was like, ‘Wow, this dude raw as hell and he’s from Chicago?’ We just shared a lot of the same ideologies,” Dreamer says.
Their video for “Gimme A Chance” is a duly loving homage to Sun Ra’s 1974 film Space Is the Place, the 85-minute Afrofuturist sci-fi film he both wrote and starred in. But the album’s visuals also owe a debt to Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy, a Japanese series which first premiered in 1963. “It’s one of the first anime to ever come out, so the music is old music, but it’s timeless. I found the whole original series [online] and I’ve been rewatching Dragon Ball Z too, just a lot of the classic anime that I grew up with. They all came out in the early 2000s and the 90s, so the music is so fire.”
It’s an incredibly exciting project to come at an incredibly exciting time for the artist, but how are they looking after their mental health in all this? “Oh, I haven’t been, to be quite frank!” Dreamer says, with a laugh. “I use YouTube to escape.” But technology is rarely the answer to existential misery. “I promise you, if I didn’t have to use my phone to do my job, I would be off the grid. I’m very much a ‘see you in real life’ person. But I do understand its value as a musician — you need to be on the internet if you’re trying to become more popular, like me. I’m not Frank Ocean, I can’t disappear and assume people will still be looking me up and getting me trending on Twitter.”
“I’m in the process of trying to figure out a therapist, but my life is just so busy. I’ve been working out a lot — I got into fitness, weightlifting and I’ve been training for the tour, which has helped. Just being back home in Lagos around family and close friends has honestly been the greatest thing for my mental health.”
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Though, with the unexpected passing of their grandfather, the circumstances around the trip are solemn, Dreamer has been able to find a few silver linings: “I’ve been thinking about spirituality a lot lately, about life and death and what happens after it,” they say. “I think this trip has really hammered home for me that I just believe in life, I believe in love, and I believe that everyone should just try to be a good person without the fear of hell and the prize of heaven.”
“Everyone should just love one another, love the earth, respect the earth,” Dreamer says. “That’s the spirituality wave I’m on: being one with the universe, connecting with the plants and connecting with people.”
Credits
Photography Lawrence Agyei