Ibeyi: ‘We sing for our dad, our sister, we sing with our ancestors’
The first time I interviewed the AfroFrench-Cuban musicians Ibeyi – twin sisters Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Diaz – was in 2015. I was a student, Skyping from my damp bedroom, writing about them for my university magazine. They were excitable 20-year-olds in Paris on the brink of putting out their self-titled debut album, the name derived from the Yoruba word for twins with divine powers. “It’s so weird!” beams LisaKaindé now, “People who’ve been following us for 10 years are still here, and still write to us, and still want to see our shows!”
This should come as no surprise. Since that beguiling first album of soulful music pulling from the breadth of their heritage, Ibeyi have grown and grown. Their gently experimental songs teem with harmony and synchronicity, while soft chants in French, Yoruba and English shimmer with warmth and spirituality. Their second album, 2017’s Ash, made several end-of-year lists, and in 2016, they appeared on Beyoncé’s groundbreaking visual album Lemonade.
On our video call today they are as sweet and exuberant as ever, but where once they would quickly interject and finish one another’s sentences, now they seem calmer and more mindful of letting each other speak. LisaKaindé joins the call from her apartment in London, the city she has called home for the past few years. Her hair is in long braids, and the room behind her is filled with plants and colourful cushions. Naomi, speaking from Paris against a plain white wall, is more reserved.
Born in Paris, daughters of the late Cuban percussionist Angá Diaz (known for his work as part of Buena Vista Social Club) and the photographer Maya Dagnino, the girls spent their childhood between France and Cuba, involved in music and dancing from an early age. Shortly after their father died in 2006, Naomi began to learn cajón (the box-shaped instrument he had played) and Lisa-Kaindé, encouraged by their mother, began to write songs. By their late teens, they had formed Ibeyi, with Lisa-Kaindé as lead vocalist and pianist, and Naomi providing vocal harmonies and percussion. They soon signed to the independent label XL Recordings, headed by producer Richard Russell, and released an
EP before that first album. Both records encompassed love and grief, mourning not only their father but also their sister Yanira, who died in 2013.
Spell 31, their latest, is their most
accomplished, ambitious album yet. Naomi steps up more as lead vocalist, and ups her contribution to production, alongside Russell. The record speaks to growth, healing, sisterhood and the catharsis of weeping. “It’s a new chapter”, says Naomi, “It’s the most balanced between us.”
The album takes its name from a passage in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, a collection of rites to be read to accompany the embalming of the departed in order to afford them protection in the afterlife. It is this that LisaKaindé quotes at the end of the majestic, twisting beats of the single Made of Gold, featuring Pa Salieu: “Oh, you with a spine / Who would work your mouth against this magic of mine / It has been handed down in an unbroken line / The sky encloses the stars / I enclose magic”. The song, Lisa-Kaindé explains, is about the reclamation of ancestral histories and magic lost to enslavement, to hold and heal intergenerational trauma. “We still can reconnect to that fire and knowledge and power, because it’s inside of us,” she says. “Singing has always been our way of reconnecting to it – we sing for our dad, our sister, we sing with our ancestors.”
Indeed, the final track of Spell 31lifts an idea from their late father, listing the names of deceased loved ones and influences on Los Muertos, recalling his Rezos. They even sample him on the song, as a way of folding him into the work. It’s a “way to say ‘we love you’”, says Naomi. Or a “mausoleum”, LisaKaindé offers: “Creating something they are a part of that is beautiful, to say thank you.”
Ibeyi had planned on challenging themselves on album No 3 by recording around the world, in Jamaica, France and America. Instead, as the pandemic hit, it became a challenge even to record in their normal location in London. Naomi had to travel from France, and isolate for 10 days each time she made the journey. “It was the hardest way to do music,” she says. “But at least we were all in the same place.”
The sisters also managed to get their collaborators into the room with them, with big names such as Jorja Smith, whose appearance, unusually, is not a guest verse but a third harmony with the duo’s vocals, “like a third sister”, says Lisa-Kaindé. It’s a reminder that at the centre of every Ibeyi record is the intimacy of their sisterhood. “Lisa is my biggest love, you know?” says Naomi.
On Spell 31the pair are older, wiser while continuing to build on the themes for which they are known. “It’s funny, I remember when I was young, I went to my mum crying,” says LisaKaindé.
“And I said: ‘The only thing I can write about is love, I’m a bad songwriter.’ She laughed and gave me a book about Francis Bacon – he said he always painted about the same thing, just in millions of different ways. My mum said: ‘That’s what you’re gonna do.’”
She tells me about an interview with musician Seun Kuti, in which when asked why he never sang about love, he replied that he had no time for love when he needed revolution. “It’s interesting,” she says, “Because for me both are so intertwined.”
Their songs have always been woven with a sense of communal care. Ash has a track sampling a Michelle Obama speech about Trump’s treatment of women; another is about police mistreatment and an incident in which Lisa-Kaindé was wrongfully stopped and searched in Paris as a teenager. When I mention their cover of the punk band Black Flag’s Rise Above with its guest verse from rapper-producer Berwyn referring to George Floyd, their response is measured. “We don’t talk about this stuff to be ‘political’,” says Naomi, “We talk about stuff that touches us, and that can maybe spark something in someone else. We’re not here to tell people how to do things.”
“I would never call myself an activist,” Lisa-Kaindé adds, laughing. “We are the same as everyone else, just trying to figure this stuff out.”
A lot has happened in the world and for the Diaz sisters since we spoke seven years ago. As Naomi puts it, “We were teenagers, and now we’re women, so of course we’ve changed!” She smiles. “But our relationship? That hasn’t changed at all.”