March 15, 2025 |
Ama is orbiting space and time. Carving out an hour in her schedule to chat has taken several attempts, over two weeks, to nail down. Often living between her native pastures of Hackney and North London, and entertainment’s mecca, Los Angeles, she’s in none of these places today. “I’m in Miami,” she reveals excitedly. Across the 4,400-plus miles between us, Ama is starting her day. Sheepishly declining a request to turn her camera on (“I’m all sweaty at the moment”), the singer tells me she’s returned from a morning run. She’ll head to work shortly (more on this later), meaning our call must be as punctual as possible. “The label will kill me if she’s late,” publicist Daisy, who’s sitting in on the call, interjects.
To the outside world, Ama’s perceived absence in music is grating, particularly for bespoke stan accounts. “She hasn’t posted anything since November…” a fan page posted in January. “Ama girl where are u??” In 2025, however, Ama Louise John is infatuated with recording, hard at work on a new sound. “I’m making music that I really, really like,” she says, the enthusiasm exuding across her higher-pitched retorts. It hasn’t always been this way for the 26-year-old, however. Releasing her critically celebrated debut album I Came Home Late a year and a half ago, she had nothing to look forward to. “I wasn’t having fun any more,” she says candidly.
She’s been writing songs since she was 11, using it as self-reflexive medium, but after her debut she struggled to find meaning. “Songwriting is always something I gravitate towards whenever anything happens. It’s a safe place for me. It just felt empty after the album.” Allowing herself to ‘let go’ and, as she puts it, “give up”, Ama removed herself from self-regulation, schedules, release deadlines, label requests and admin. “I lost a sense of self, I lost a sense of why I was doing this. I needed to re-calibrate. I wasn’t enjoying the highs or feeling the lows,” she says.
Consciously stepping back was far from easy. A self-proclaimed optimist, the singer is usually thankful for each and every day, ready to seize the moment. When that wasn’t the case, she took matters into her own hands. “I took a chance on something that initially felt counterintuitive.” Adamant in her contemplations of risk versus reward, Ama feels realms away from the young adult who crafted I Came Home Late a few years prior. “I don’t even have an inkling of the sameness.” She’s thankful for letting go, grateful for space and time to simply exist in the intersections of freedom and spontaneity.
Fluid across its 15-track offering, I Came Home Late is studiously mature, quickly gnawing at the ear before engulfing it in its prowess. The balm of an indie and pop-rock facing Car Parts, placed alongside the synth-doused, electronic-formed Silence, which wedges itself between the brooding brand of R&B, soft rock and soul hybrid found in Tokyo Cowboy, Ama binds elements found across her early EPs into a crescendo of endearingly crafted songs, each their own “planet”, as she often puts it, aligned in a wider universe.
Retrospectively, however, she acknowledges a density to her debut album, one she ponders on for a few moments. “I’m not hating on my work. This isn’t a negative, but it’s kind of a lot,” she says with a smile. “There’s so much audible information.” She remembers the pop-structured writing process behind a lot of the project, which she held herself to. “I get halfway through and I have to take a break.”
Part of the pressures stem from a childhood of relative freedom in exploration. The second daughter of a Guyanese father and English mother, Ama and her elder sister Mahalia were given room to develop their own practices growing up. “We had the space to decide who we wanted to be and what kind of people we wanted to be. Because we had a lot of space to test it, it kind of drummed up both of us to have this work ethic.” She quickly saw results – like a touring support slot with Jorja Smith following her inaugural EP DDD’s 2018 release – but the pressure to push forward persisted, as she held her songwriting to ever higher creative standards.
During her year off, Ama has been countering her intense creative processes with simplicity. “I want to create music that I was inspired by growing up,” she says. “I want my next project to be top-to-bottom easy to listen to, to the point where you don’t notice it starting again because it’s so easy to digest.”
As well as her technical refinement, Ama Louise John, the person, is visually stimulated in her process – she’s an advocate for breaks because the world around her crafts visual patterns that inform how future releases will sound. A recent ski-led winter break in the Alps, for example, manifested a deep appreciation for snow. “Just the element of snow and ice and all the colours and lights they project onto objects. I’m obsessed now.” The environmental element has informed the sound of an upcoming release. “[The sound] will reflect the big ‘steppy’ movements, kind of like hood motifs, which I obviously super fucking appreciate. I put those two elements together because I was like, ‘That hasn’t been done before.’”
Rap isn’t new to Ama. It’s tightly woven into aspects of her songwriting, modulation and cadence. Northside, from her second album Ama, Who?, for example, sees her ad-libbing and darting across the second verse like a seasoned hip-hop lyricist, expertly wedged between nonchalance and annoyance as she questions a lover. But it’s the viral 2022 release Same Old Ways from EP At Least We Have This that unapologetically embraces the art form of rap. In it, she’s cocky, headsure and dicing patois, Black British slang and English in a smart, funny and brashly London-centric manner. “I need a certain grit sometimes in my music,” she says. Rap appeals due to its ‘hardness’, it has an attitude that needs little explanation. “It’s the feeling, a realness.” Laughing that she sounds so ‘white’ in her adjectival choices, the practice succinctly places Ama’s precision at the fore. She isn’t emulating or seeking to be a rapper, but utilises its ability to help her punctuate as a performer.
Ama may be on hiatus, but that hasn’t stopped her curiosity in fashion continuing to evolve. A recent Salomon partner, she’s also worked with esteemed houses like Chanel, and models Louis Vuitton’s latest Murakami collaboration on these pages. Her infatuation with fashion extends far beyond campaigns and red carpets. “I’m obsessed with clothes, but in a way it’s fashion history and also textile history. Clothes have a representation in everyone’s lives and always have done since we put them on in the Stone Age.” Her studious approach to fashion is crystal clear, sharp, aligning with her primary vocation of music. In her ability to world-build and bend the likes of R&B, Ama also admits to her ambiguity appearing in some of her lyrics. “I think I hid behind them for a lot of my career,” she says. Pointing to DDD as a body of work, she can’t recall what she was trying to articulate in places.
“It’s so cryptic. People will come up to me in shows and be like this means that to me and I’m so glad that it actually landed somewhere.” In its analogies of burnt blood, pondering spontaneity and loving more when the sun goes down, it’s easy to see what she means: there’s no clear throughline. Open to interpretation, Ama’s meaning is hidden in plain sight.
In the parasocial world of music fandom, Ama’s obscurity has led to eyebrow-raising misconceptions about both her persona and practices outside the booth. “‘I thought you were going to be cold,’” she recalls an applicant telling her at a recent interview for a role on her team. Laughing earnestly, she welcomes unwarranted perceptions of herself, despite their fallacious nature. “People also think I’m this whimsical, go-with-the-flow artist who just does things when they feel like it and is mysterious and quiet and all of this. And I’m like, I’ve never been described as less Type A.”
The Ama that I’ve been talking to for just over an hour is self-assured, charmingly confident, bold, funny and hidden; the mystery is there, but it’s simply the counter to a person who’s been boundary-driven in their career to date – she politely refuses to go into, what she calls, a “hard” background growing up. “No one wants to read a sad and depressing story in interviews and I’m not one to walk around with a chip on my shoulder.” She does, however, promise more transparency in her lyricism going forward. “When I’m coming back out with this music, I want it to be like, ‘This is who I am.’” In her closing remarks, the determination ossifies itself to Ama’s tone, as she clarifies her intentions with full conviction. “You can still make up whatever you think about me, but now I’m being honest. I’m stepping to the table in an honest way, I’m narrating the story a little bit more and taking the wheel. I’m saying things that actually resonate with me and I’m done being cryptic.”
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 74 – MUSIC, TALENT, CREATIVE – on newsstands March 18. Pre-order your copy here.
@amalougistics / louisvuitton.com
LOUIS VUITTON X MURAKAMI: PLAY TIME
Photographer ZACH APO-TSANG
Fashion Editor SOPHIA NEOPHITOU
Talent AMA
Text NICOLAS-TYRELL SCOTT
Movement director ED MUNRO at Canvas Represents
Dancers KOJO HAMMOND at AMCK Dance and JASON HENRY at Wilhelmina
Hair ISSAC POLEON at The Wall Group using BUMBLE AND BUMBLE
Make-up MATA MARIELLE at The Wall Group using HOURGLASS Cosmetics
Digital operator ANDREW BROADHURST
Photographer’s assistant JOHN NEATE
Fashion assistants GEORGIA EDWARDS and SASKIA LEWIS
Hair assistant LEE-ANNE WILLOUX
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU
Special thanks to AMELIA WHITE and DAISY HADDIGAN
Bags, accessories and shoes throughout by LOUIS VUITTON x MURAKAMI
Clothing throughout by LOUIS VUITTON
