No One Sounds Like Tems

The Nigerian singersongwriter mesmerized music's biggest names with a handful of songs. That was just the beginning.

- Connor Garel

IT'S JUST AFTER 2 p.m. in Ladbroke Grove, a West London neighborhood still holding to its fading memory as England's Haight-Ashbury. Tems is reclining in a chair she has been sitting in for the better part of two days ahead of the holidays, fiddling on Ableton with a languorous track called "Not an Angel" that she thinks, finally, after several months, she has figured out. She is in the last stages of completing her debut album and has been intermittently napping here in her studio, instead of sleeping in her own perfectly good bed, returning home merely to take showers, drink some celery juice, and change her clothes. "I would say that I definitely deal with symptoms of perfectionism," she says.

She likes to work alone, in near silence, and seems sensitive to the slightest emotional tremor. Any reaction, she says, whether quiet disappointment or rapturous excitement, can threaten the “purity” she aims for. The songs begin as freestyles that creep up on her, forcing her into airplane bathrooms or closet spaces or outside studios at other people’s sessions so she can record whatever pours out of her before she loses it forever. It’s a dreamlike state she can access best when in private, and often, when scatting halfformed words into the mic of her iPhone, she ends up exhuming her buried emotions into Voice Memos. “I have no clue what’s going to come out,” she says, “and I find myself saying weird things. Hurt feelings come out a lot. And when I play it back, it’s like, Oh, so this is how you feel.”