Maria Uzor - Fantasyland Maria Uzor

The album Fantasyland arrives on September 4th via Hey Buffalo Records and plays with notions of escapism in a world that appears increasingly unpredictable. Written and recorded entirely in the spare room of her flat in Norwich, the 9 tracks bend and dart through a spectrum of genres, gathering shards of techno, electro, triphop, indie and bass along the way. On writing the album, Maria says: “I wanted to build my own world, largely away from online distractions. There’s an expectation for artists to create music that panders to the algorithm, which I think can be quite damaging in the long run. I didn’t want to do that. To actively buck a trend like that can leave you feeling quite vulnerable. Part of the story of making this album has been a journey back to personal realignment. It’s an ongoing thing, always shifting and rebalancing.” Single Don’t Touch Me creeps like a stark, ludic call to embrace the child within. An effortlessly detached offering that sits in opposition to the noise generated on social media.

Maria Uzor’s music arrives like a pirate broadcast from a distant corner of the galaxy. An electronic producer and vocalist inspired by both dark and light, order and chaos, power and vulnerability, she blends genres into new worlds, mixing electro, trip-hop, proto-rave and techno to create a soundtrack for the outsider in search of dance floor epiphany. Her live shows exhibit the kind of tension that comes from a fearlessness and a deep desire for human connection. Her music, part repetition, part reinvention, calls to never lose sight of the human inside the machine.

Born in Norwich, UK, to a Barbadian mother and Nigerian father, Maria grew up to the sounds of reggae and African music in the home, and punk, indie and hip-hop in the world outside. A black girl in a white environment, curious, observant, and with an increasing desire to carve out a landscape for herself in a world in which she had no reflection, her music bends and twists reality to shape a world in which she, and anyone else who wants to join, can feel at home.

Maria began singing and playing guitar in her first band, garage punk 4-piece The Incidentals in the mid-noughties, before moving on to the psych-witch solo project Girl In A Thunderbolt in 2008. She then formed the post-punk dance duo Sink Ya Teeth in 2017 to critical acclaim. She’s been producing and self-releasing under her own name since 2021, gaining support from Jamz Supernova, Amy Lame, BBC Introducing, and 6 Music.