BACKSTORY: A singer, songwriter, and producer who built her reputation behind the scenes before stepping into her own vividly imagined world
FROM: South London
YOU MIGHT KNOW HER FROM: Writing credits for artists including LISA, Normani, and Teddy Swims, features on songs by Tinashe, MARINA, and RAYE, or her 2023 solo debut Cerebrum
NOW: Releasing her sophomore album Paracosm, a childlike musical universe years in the making
Absolutely didn’t set out to make a concept album. In fact, for a while there, she couldn’t make Paracosm at all. There were different titles and different directions, but none of them fit. “I was stuck,” she admits. “I was putting pressure on myself to find the single or to find the hit.” That realization forced a reset. Instead of chasing something outward-facing, Absolutely turned inward—back to the version of herself that made music before there were expectations. “I had to really put myself back in that headspace of just freedom and childlike wonder and imagination,” she explains.
The word that would eventually define the project arrived via a YouTube comment: A fan called Absolutely their “paracosm,” and she looked the term up. The definition—a detailed imaginary world, often created in childhood as a form of escape or expression—gave her a narrative framework. “It just fit perfectly,” she says. From there, the album began to take shape—not as a collection of songs, but as a fully realized environment.
“I had to really put myself back in that headspace of just freedom and childlike wonder and imagination.”
The final stretch of Paracosm, including the tracks “Nowhere to Hide” and “No Audience,” became the clearest expressions of that shift. They’re less concerned with structure or strategy than they are with feeling—specifically the act of breaking through the mental barriers that had stalled her in the first place. “‘Nowhere to Hide’ was the breakthrough point,” Absolutely says. “It was just letting go and enjoying writing again.” That sense of release runs through the record, even as the subject matter veers from euphoric to devastating. On “Trojan Horse,” for example, she captures the moment of realizing a relationship is over in real time. “As soon as he left, I got on the mic,” she says. “I released all of the emotions.” The take you hear, she adds, is essentially the first one. Elsewhere, she pushes into unfamiliar territory: “Prototype,” originally written for a video game brief, leans into a disorienting 5/8 time signature and a more confrontational tone. “It’s very confident and bold and a little bit cocky, which is not usually my character,” she admits. “But I really liked it, so I just had to put it out.”
If her 2023 debut Cerebrum was instinctive and fast-moving, Paracosm is the opposite: slower, more intentional, and shaped by setbacks that in hindsight feel almost necessary. At one point, a broken hard drive wiped out entire sessions. Instead of panicking, she recalibrated. “I just felt like, ‘OK, this is what’s supposed to be happening right now and I can make it better.’” That mindset—equal parts surrender and control—extends to the album’s wider aesthetic. She’s been heavily involved in everything from the songwriting to the visual world, even sketching costume ideas herself. An animation project to accompany the new album is currently in development, allowing her imagination to stretch beyond the limitations of live action. “With animation, you can do anything that you imagine,” she says. “My imagination is so endless that being limited by what we can do in the physical world sometimes is what gets in the way.”
“My imagination is so endless that being limited by what we can do in the physical world sometimes is what gets in the way.”
It’s an approach that makes more sense when you consider her background. Long before stepping into the spotlight, Absolutely was already embedded in the industry as a songwriter, contributing to tracks for a wide range of artists. Writing for others, she explains, is comparatively straightforward. “They’ll usually steer the direction and it’s really fun to just put myself in someone else’s shoes.” But writing for herself is another story entirely. “There’s a lot more detail, a lot more thought. Figuring out what I want to say—that’s usually the more difficult thing.” That difference is part of what makes Paracosm feel like a turning point not just sonically, but also philosophically. For the first time, she sounds less interested in proving something and more interested in exploring it.
Still, the outside world hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it’s expanding rapidly. Absolutely recently toured with her superstar sister RAYE, performing in arenas across Europe alongside their other sister Amma. Onstage, the trio came together for “Joy,” a gospel-leaning moment that lives up to its name. “It’s really surreal,” she says, “jumping around and singing with my sisters in front of tens of thousands of people.” The uplifting collaboration found a permanent home on RAYE’s just-released This Music May Contain Hope album. “No one really understands what I’m going through more than her,” she says of RAYE. “She’s really been a big part of my stability, my encouragement.” There’s also a sense of loss now that she’s touring with other artists. “I didn’t really feel it until I got here,” she admits of being apart from family. “I was like, ‘Oh, where are my sisters?’” It’s a small detail, but a telling one.
For all the scale of what’s happening around her—arena shows, festival slots, a multimedia album rollout—Absolutely’s creative center remains intensely personal: family, memory, imagination, the things that existed before the career, and will likely outlast it. Which brings us back to Paracosm. Not just as an album, but as an idea: a place you build for yourself when the real world becomes too rigid, too noisy, too prescriptive. A place where you can start again. “I hope that it can spark that sense of childlike wonder in the listener,” she says. “When I’m listening, it feels like I’m giving a hug to my inner child and I hope that they feel like that as well.” FL
Photo by Han Yang
