“Artist and friend. Happy to be here,” says young Queens musician duendita in her Twitter bio. We’re also happy she’s here, making beautiful future-R&B and achieving beautiful things as she makes her way through the not always beautiful world. duendita has been killing it since 2013, when she was just 15 years old and scored independent film Swim Little Fish Swim , which premiered at SXSW. The following year she released the 10-track This Is Not An Album, which, although looking suspiciously like an album, was actually a project pairing her original songs with pieces of art in the Magritte exhibition at the MoMA. Fancy.
She then released One Of One , all raw piano and vocals recorded in a Paris studio, uploaded it to Soundcloud and watched shit take off and music blogs take note. In the meantime, bagging a well-deserved scholarship to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in her native NY, she’s just about graduated and, according to her Instagram, has invested in a one-way ticket to Berlin where it seems she might be staying for a while.
Taken from her forthcoming EP direct line to My Creator, we’re truly, madly, deeply in love with pray, a soul-soothing number and the ultimate showcase of duendita’s brilliant baritone voice. Ebro Darden has already picked up on the track, featuring it on his Beats 1 show last week and even freestyling over it a little. Princess Nokia is a fan too, telling her on Instagram that, “You r my absolute favorite and to know u… well the pleasure the honor is mine.” The honour is ours today, because we have the pleasure of sharing duendita’s first ever music video. “ pray celebrates growing up in a diverse environment while envisioning/demanding an inclusive and safe world for all,” the artist told us over email. “As my own ode to joy, this live performance of pray is a meditation on mindfulness and peace.”
As she takes you to church, fills your afternoon with harmonies and a string quartet, and urges you to hurry up and do something before the world ends; reflect, pray and peace out to duendita.