Mabel Wants You to Know Who She Is

Growing up in West London in a family of influential creatives and musicians, singer-songwriter Mabel Alabama-Pearl McVey, better known as Mabel, had a deeply organic relationship with the arts from the start. “I don’t remember ever making a decision. It was just always around me,” she shared over Zoom this past fall.

Mabel is considered one of the U.K.’s brightest pop-R&B stars, having already made her mark on the industry with one of the boldest (and most listened to) female albums of the last few years.

She was in the back of an Uber calling on her cell, traveling back into the city after a quick therapeutic horseback ride squeezed in between meetings. “I took my first steps on a tour bus and after school I was going to the studio with my dad,” she recalls. “I watched lots of creative people make a living out of something that is so pure. It was always the thing that made the most sense to me.”

This sense of possibility fueled a confident adolescent songwriting start that, thanks to her catchy hooks, quickly gave way to an overwhelmingly successful entry into the industry. “I started making music with a good friend of mine, Oscar Scheller,” says Mabel. “We made my first-ever songs, it was the first time I recorded in the studio. I must have been fifteen. And I was like, ‘This is definitely what I wanted to do.’”

Within a couple years, she released her first song—the uplifting, gently seductive R&B track “Know Me Better”—on Soundcloud in August 2015. The song was played on Radio 1 by Annie Mac and by that October, she was signed to Universal Music. Mabel’s first official single, “Finders Keepers” (2017), shot to number eight on the UK Singles Chart. Her debut album, the aptly named High Expectations (2019), reached number three. And then she won Female Solo Artist at the 2020 Brit Awards, all before releasing a second album in 2022 that hit the second spot on the U.K. charts.

All the while, her family provided a creative cocoon but no doubt attracted additional attention, opportunity, and criticism. For those who don’t know, Mabel’s mother is the seminal punk and post-punk artist Neneh Cherry, the lead singer of all-female reggae punk band The Slits, perhaps best known for her solo debut “Buffalo Stance.” Her grandfather is legendary free jazz musician Don Cherry. And her father is Massive Attack and Portishead producer Cameron McVey. Both of her siblings make music as well.

From that organic, free-moving beginning, Mabel’s career has taken on a life of its own, sometimes dictated by the music industry machine at rapid speed. Her early music was electric, blending raw, gracefully and playfully to-the-point lyricism with R&B pop and, in its strongest moments, Afrobeat and Afroswing inspirations. It was also influenced by the pressure cooker of the major label infrastructure, becoming increasingly more produced and guided by the time’s mainstream pop. “Particularly as a female artist, there is this constant pressure to reinvent yourself: ‘What’s the era?’ ‘What’s the look?’” muses Mabel. “And in some ways you want to be able to know what it is that you’re selling. But I am so many different things and I just want to be myself.”

Now twenty-eight, Mabel is in the midst of what may best be described as a creative homecoming, coming off of two years of heavy introspection and taking apart what it means to be a part of the industry machine, pushing against the pressures of pop stardom, and, at heart, going back to her roots. “I’ve been trying to find the love again for making music,” she says. “Sometimes, when your hobby becomes your job, you kind of forget that it needs to come from a spiritual frequency. I’ve been on that treadmill for a long time.”

Since 2022, she has been releasing music that will make up a mixtape out this February, going back to the people who know her best and the spaces where she can authentically create and make music on her own terms. “I find it way too easy to pretend or play a character. I think that has a lot to do with being a young woman coming into the industry at a young age,” she explains. “For so long, the setup was, you turn the female artist into something, when actually what we really need to do is be ourselves. For me, the first step of the process is bringing people around me who know me on a Sunday when I’m just watching TV and hanging out with my dogs. How do we get that person into the music?”

This process meant spending time with family, especially her brother, Marlon Roudette, with whom she collaborates. “My first thought was, ‘Let me bring him in again.’” she recalls. “Because he knew that early voice. He knows me in my rawest, truest form. It’s like making a sculpture together.”

It also meant traveling to connect with and make music tied to her roots, first to Sweden, where her mother grew up, and later to Nigeria, the hub of the African music industry, to connect with her Sierra Leonian heritage.

She’s been steadily releasing tracks since diving back in. These include “Look at My Body, Pt. II,” a saucy, brazenly confident anthem deconstructing the objectifying nature of the music industry with British rapper Shygirl; the Afroswing underlined “Chat;” and the sultry, calmly seductive “Vitamins,” which leans into Mabel’s delicate vocals and R&B roots. Her newest release, “All Over You,” brings in Ghanaian singer-songwriter King Promise. “It’s a celebration of my African heritage and everything that’s happening in music there, but also it is so me in what I’ve done with the melodies and songwriting,” she grins. “That’s also different for the genre. That’s what I am. I am a collage, I am a puzzle of all these different things.”

The hope is for her new music to reflect her genuine self in all its complexities, inviting people in and allowing them to be a part of the process. “I’m kind of organized chaos,” says Mabel. “I’m a mixed-race woman who grew up in many different places, I’m bilingual. There are all these different things about me that I wanted to find a way to put into my music and show people my heritage but also my breadth as an artist.”

Mabel is the first to acknowledge that the industry has changed in the last few years. “There aren’t people in rooms going, ‘This is going to be a big hit.’ You can’t engineer those things anymore,” she reflects. “Before, it was like, ‘Okay, the pop stars and artists need to be these aspirational, otherworldly beings.’ Now, they want to know about you. I think the goal is for people to know more about who I am, with every song to give people more of a bit of what is really me. Then other stuff will follow. For so long, so much of it was about the other stuff—the machine of everything. Well, actually your machine is broken.”

Perhaps the industry is finally ready for her.

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