TiKA Releases Her Brand New Single “Sideways” Featured along with Official Music Video
Tika has been honing her craft for just under 5 years, after stepping onto a stage at the Milk River venue in Brooklyn, to cover for a singer who was running late. She sang Prince’s “I will Die For You”, and the wheels of musical creation haven’t stopped since.
The homage to Prince is interpreted as a ballad on her debut full-length, ‘Anywhere But Here’ coming February 26 via Canadian indie imprint Next Door Records (The Weather Station, Aidan Knight, Ada Lea) Embracing the genre rightfully coined as “futuristic nostalgia”, Tika draws from the legacy of Black Queer women of the 1990s: Meshell Ndegeocello, Tracy Chapman, Dionne Farris and Diana King – artists who she observed to have “rawness and grace in what they were saying through music. Tika’s motivation is to communicate with our universal language – music. Anywhere But Here’ is set to illustrate similar qualities as those artists she admires.
Tika’s compositions offer “ethereal sounds that wrap around you, reminding you of other memories”. The vibe remains current, and like the artist herself, evolving. With production work from friend and fellow artist, Casey MQ, and a duet with R’n’B artist, Desiire, the album’s themes address deeply personal relationships to ones’ inspired by Tika’s Jamaican roots to others that are sonic representations of conversations with the self.
Sideways was cultivated from a vulnerable place of immense pain when I was feeling a great deal of shame for making a mistake with a friend. I didn’t know what to do because I felt that I had ruined the relationship to the point of not turning back. It made me feel unbalanced and insecure. At the intersections of the pivotal & life-changing moments that we face, we can feel unsteady. Uncertain for the future. The one thing that I could always count on to hold me was music and freedom. Music to guide my steps, freedom in the reality that I was indeed human and flawed. Despite the remorse, I was encouraged by the fact that there may be room in every heart for reconciliation and redemption
Next Door Records is a Toronto based record label and a subsidiary of the Outside Music Group. The label is the home to a diverse roster including Lydia Persaud, Hua Li, Charlotte Cornfield, Luka Kuplowsky, Aidan Knight, Ada Lea, and The Weather Station.