Is it possible to put a whole self into a single album? Can any artist make one record that sums up the many interconnected facets of their being in a handful of recordings? Maybe not–and maybe it’s impossible to be sure–but for genuinely skilled performers, the mere attempt can be fruitful. On multimodal artist Lollise’s full-length debut, I Hit the Water, this is abundantly clear.
A vivid and variegated work, it sees Lollise draw on an array of sounds, languages, and sentiments to build a story of her personhood. It is overwhelmingly successful. From this thoughtfully woven collection of 14 tracks (ten on the vinyl version, but no less worthwhile for the reduction) emerges a multidimensional understanding of Lollise and where, in the broadest sense, she comes from and exists as a creator.
Born in Botswana and based in New York, Lollise’s palette is broad. She opens I Hit the Water with a distinctly folk-influenced style, singing in Setswana over nature sounds and a wordless chorus for the duration of a brief introduction, “Khukhwane”. From there, she glides smoothly into a more balanced blend of electric hums and unplugged percussion on “Bridge to Nowhere”, a song in which she makes her mission clear: “Me, I’m running, and I don’t care / I’ll build a bridge to nowhere / You can come, or you can stay there / I built this path for me.” As the said path unfolds, we follow, but it’s evident that Lollise is right: this is her way we are witnessing, and she’s not compromising her flow to fit into anyone else’s box.
Instead, Lollise is always in motion. She moves between English, Setswana, and Kalanga in her lyrics and between highlife, kwaito, and EDM (to name a few) in her music. She offers deeply personal accounts from her past and present, each providing building blocks plotting a trajectory into some unknowable future. Sometimes, Lollise lays the plots bare: bright and reverent “eDube” goes out to her late father; gqom-adjacent “Semang Mang” is a high-energy meditation on confidence and seeking approval from others; “Iron Woman” is a growling critique of the racist, misogynistic power structures that reign over healthcare and wellness industries.
In dreamy “Mme Mma Ndi”, Lollise reflects on how she has and has not met her mother’s expectations. In other songs, Lollise interweaves poetry and folklore in evocative combinations. In the entrancing “Blue Skies”, she contemplates her place amid the greatest forces of nature; the verses of synth-heavy “iKalanga” read like well-crafted proverbs.
Appropriately, the final track of I Hit the Water is “It’s Me”, a ballad that puts Lollise’s velvet voice at the forefront of swelling keys and gentle rhythms. Here, she seals the worldview she’s spent the album building, putting her existence in perspective as being inextricably related to other lives. “This isn’t gonna last forever / Life goes on and on,” she sings, choruses of “on and on and on and” emphasizing the endless flow of time in which Lollise will always find herself. I Hit the Water isn’t endless but packed to the brim. It is a marvelous autobiography into which Lollise has put as much of her multifaceted self as is humanly possible. Brilliant, swirling, and compelling, it is a debut that deserves all your attention.