Only I'll Know — The Story Behind the Song
Twelve borders, twelve tongues, twelve kinds of hunger. My new single is about a wanderer looking for where she belongs — and finding the answer in the last place she expected: the looking itself.
Only I'll Know is out now, 28 August 2026, via my label VELA. It's Afro-house — kalimba, djembe, talking drum and call-and-response chants — and it's the biggest, most physical thing I've made. It's also, underneath the drums, the most personal.
What is Only I'll Know about?
It's about a wanderer. Someone moving through the world, across borders and languages, asking the same question everywhere she lands: is this it? is this home?
For most of the song she doesn't get an answer. She sleeps in a city that never learns her face, wakes to a river that never asks her name. Everyone keeps asking where she's from, and the best she can offer is "home is the sound of not being alone."
And then the breakdown lets the question go entirely:
And if I never find it
let the searching be the home
That's the whole song in two lines. The searching isn't the thing standing between you and home — the searching is the home. I didn't know that was the ending until I wrote it.
The title
The chorus is "I'll know when I'm there — only I'll know." Nobody else can tell you when you've arrived. Not your family, not the people who love you, not the ones asking where you're from. There's no map for it and no one to confirm it. You'll feel it in your feet before your heart catches up, and you will be the only witness. That's the title.
The sound — why Afro-house
My album Heels on My Hand lived in chic vocal house — small hours, close mic, heartbreak on a dancefloor. This one needed to be bigger. A song about crossing continents can't be claustrophobic.
So it opens on a lone kalimba — thumb piano, the smallest possible sound — and then the drums arrive and a log-drum bass drops the floor out. Djembe, hand drums, talking drum and shaker carry it; guitars, bass and synths build the room. It sits at 121 BPM and runs 5:22, because it needed space to actually travel.
Two things make it feel like more than one person's song. There's a guest rap verse in the third act — drums cut, just percussion and kalimba — and there are call-and-response group chants. The chant syllables aren't a real language; they're invented, so nobody is excluded from singing them. That's deliberate. A song about not belonging anywhere should be singable by everyone.
The verse that runs the furthest
The rap verse is my favourite thing on the record:
They got maps for the places that already got names
I'm the one drawing lines where the map got blank
And then it names the cost, which most travel songs skip: "I don't run from the ones that I loved and I left / I just never found the room where my breath fit best." Leaving isn't always running. Sometimes it's just still looking.
The artwork — Moon Ritual
The cover is a painting called Moon Ritual / The Seer. A figure seen from behind, wearing a tall beaded halo crown of cowrie shells and gold, an enormous pale full moon rising behind their head, blood-red silk pooling against a deep cobalt night. Painterly, editorial, no text at all.
They're facing away on purpose. You don't see where they're going, and neither do they. You just see them looking.
What's next — the video
A cinematic music video is in production: a journey across Africa ending in Mauritius, told through dance, traditional dress and the people met along the way. No release date yet. Follow along and you'll see it first.
If you're somewhere between where you left and where you're going — this one's yours. For fans of Tems, Ayra Starr and Black Coffee, and for anyone who's ever been asked where they're from and not had a short answer.
Go where the drum say go.
Only I'll Know is out now on every platform.
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