Name: Sasha Keable

Where She’s From: South London

When She Started: 2006

Genre: R&B/Neo-Soul

File Next To: Olivia Nelson, Miraa May, Etta Bond, Sipprell

Sounds Like: “Soulful, emotional, from the heart—I don’t like to put it in a box as such. I think if it connects and you like it, then great!”

First Music That Inspired Her: “Donny Hathaway’s ‘A Song For You’, simply because I’d never heard a voice like that before. I heard it the first time maybe when I was 10 or 11 and thought, ‘Wow! This is crazy. This is what I wanted to do. Even at that young age, it just really resonated with me.”

Raised on a seemingly contradictory diet of heavy metal and classic R&B, Sasha Keable tells us her childhood home was filled with music of all genres. She describes her father as “a real music head” who introduced her to a whole range of genres from country to hip-hop and everything in between. Eventually, it would be her older sister who introduced her to the worlds of soul and R&B. From there, she flung herself headlong into the classics; Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, and also newer heroes like Lauryn Hill, would all be on heavy rotation during Keable’s formative years.

2014 was the year she put out her first official release, the Lemongrass And Limeleaves EP. That four-tracker introduced the world to her electronic-based blend of R&B and soul, but it was very different from subsequent releases. Instead of the velvety futurism of R&B in 2019, Lemongrass And Limeleaves sounded as if it could have comes straight from the 1980s, nodding to electro-pop behind her soulful riffs and runs. In the four years between that EP and her next release, 2018’s “That’s The Shit”, Keable’s sound matured considerably and the production she sang over instead struck a balance between classic soul instrumentation and bleeding edge electronics—and she continues down that path to this day.

For now she’s taking things one step at a time without any long-term expectations—because, as we all know in the music industry, the future can be very fragile. Today, Sasha Keable is just happy to have taken things as far as she has. “There were times I thought I wanted to give up and that I wasn’t good enough,” she says, “but I’m just really proud to be here, putting out music that I absolutely love and that I’m so very proud of.” In the immediate future, however, Keable will be putting out her upcoming MAN EP on April 26 followed quickly by a headline show. Beyond that, she’s more than content to just take each day as it comes.