After moving to the U.S. for school, her focus shifted away from music and towards her studies. But despite not actively creating, the pull of making music was something she couldn’t ignore. “I always knew that at one point in time I’ll go back to my passion, which is music, but I just needed the right time.” That time came post-graduation, where a move from her full-time job in New York to the company’s U.K. offices gave her the change to work on what would become her debut album, MatterMoreForSis. “While I was in that transition, I had a large gap of time where I was at home. And I was able to reconnect with some of my friends, other music producers in Zimbabwe,” she explained. “So that was like this one-month intensive where I was in the studio every day, living in a rented house with the producer. That was the creative process.”
A play on the word metamorphosis, it tracks a transformative journey through heartbreak, self-reflection, and healing. “It was related to work, some personal relationships…there were so many things that were going in a way that I didn’t expect, so it was reassurance for myself that this painful process will have a beautiful purpose afterwards,” she explained, detailing the story that unfolds through the project’s tracklist.
On “Survive The Night,”, Joy’s smooth vocals soar over New Wave-inspired production as she laments the end of a rocky relationship, while “Go” finds the singer struggling to accept and move on from the realities of betrayal. “As the album progresses, at some point when you get to ‘Queendom’, she says to herself, ‘you can’t dim my light,’” she explains. By the song’s closing tracks “New Day” and the bouncy “Somebody,” she’s ready to embark on a hopeful new journey.
[colabot1]