After a breakout 2022 that saw the rising DJ/producer/songwriter collect a full shelf of awards, including a MOBO and BBC Music Introducing Artist of the Year, Nia Archives’ third EP was intended to act as a “taste palette” and a trailer for her full-length debut. “I feel like if I would’ve been a bit more patient, I could have had a really sick album,” she tells Apple Music. “But I think I have to introduce people to where I’m at musically first. I do the club stuff, but I also write real songs as well.” Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall takes its name from a track Archives made during a six-month stint of sleepless nights during the pandemic. The punchy breakbeats are familiar, but the lyrical candour is new. “My music’s so vulnerable that I need to be around people that I feel safe to do that with,” she says. “When you listen to really emotional music on loop for six hours, you have to be with people that you can trust.” To that end, she keeps her creative circle small, writing the bulk of the EP with long-term collaborator and mentor Jakwob (Little Simz, Shygirl, Celeste) and songwriter Ed Thomas (Stormzy, Jorja Smith, Kojey Radical) at her Shoreditch studio over a two-week period in 2022. Archives drew on a number of influences—“obviously 1992-1996 old-school jungle, my fave jungle era, Brazilian music, some real indie/emo/punk moments, R&B-esque and soul moments”—to create an airtight capsule collection of six tracks. Running from the infectious kineticism of “Baianá” to the minimalist “No Need 2 Be Sorry, Call Me?”, the EP is a showcase for her impressive versatility as a songwriter and producer. “Each song has its own window and a story,” says Archives. “I hope that people can relate to some of the themes that I touch on and they feel they can hear their own stories in the music.” Here, she takes us through those stories and themes, track by track. “Baianá” “This was just a fun thing I started on my computer one Sunday. I loved the original song by the Barbatuques [São Paulo body music collective], and I was trying to show homage to samba, bossa nova, Brazilian music and also [Brazilian drum ’n’ bass producers] DJ Patife, DJ Marky. Then I spent a few weeks deep-diving into the drums. I have to be able to listen to the drum loop with no music on it and enjoy that. I think drums are a bit spiritual. I feel quite mesmerised when I listen to drums. There’s a lot of lazy drum ’n’ bass at the moment, where they just chuck a breakbeat on a song and don’t do anything to it, but I always chop my drums up, and I have to get every single break that I’ve chopped up to match.” “That’s Tha Way Life Goes” “This is way more mature than a lot of the things on this project. It’s a window into the album. The production was quite fun—it’s like bossa nova meets neo-soul—but the main thing I spent time on was the writing. I like to be really intentional with what I’m saying and I really like rhyming. A lot of people say you don’t need to rhyme, but I enjoy it, it’s like a jigsaw. It’s about accepting that sometimes love isn’t how you want it to be. That’s just the way life is, it’s not the end of the world. It’s a dust-it-off-your-shoulder thing, rather than cry yourself to sleep about it.” “No Need 2 Be Sorry, Call Me?” (feat. Maverick Sabre)” “I love Maverick Sabre. Our voices work really nicely together, and he’s just a legend. We made another song before this that was more of a gospel vibe, but it wasn’t what I was trying to do. We spent three hours trying to work on this thing we weren’t feeling and then in the last hour, Mav started playing around on the guitar and he came up with the little R&B riff. I think I sang the chorus first and he wrote around that, and we were trying to do this call-and-response, back-and-forth dialogue in the song. It’s the most minimal jungle I could possibly do, and there’s really not a lot going on production-wise—but I feel like I made up for that in other places.” “So Tell Me…” “I wanted to make a song with strings on it and I wanted it to feel really emotional and very British. Every one of my favourite songs has strings, and every iconic British song has strings on it—they’re a bit of a cheat code. The breakdown is super grungy bass, and the drums are quite jungle-y. The lyrics came really quickly. I’m talking about estrangement, which is something I’ve never spoken about because there’s so much stigma. There’s no awareness around it. You don’t really see it on TV or anywhere, but a lot of people are estranged from someone. So I wanted to get this secret off my chest, which was scary, but my tolerance for being vulnerable is getting bigger and bigger, and that means when I get to the album, I can be really deep and not feel so scared to talk about my life.” “Conveniency” ‘“Ed, James [Jacob, aka Jakwob] and I made this track the first day we met. Ed played the guitar, I did the drums, James did all the organ sounds and stuff like that on the production, and me and Ed wrote the song together. I’ve done a lot of growing up this year and certain situations really forced me to look at myself. This song was me saying, ‘I’m not just an option, I’m a human being, and I’m never going to be anyone’s convenience again.’ I’m glad that I wrote it, I feel like a lot of people are relating to it.” “Sunrise Bang Ur Head Against tha Wall” “The title track started off just as a beat that I made in lockdown. I had really bad insomnia at that time. My life was just making music at 3 am in the morning and watching the sun come up. That was a literal sunrise, banging your head against the wall—that feeling when the sun comes up and it’s bliss because of the golden rays and whatever, but then also disgusting because I was so sleep-deprived. I sang the lyrics and also used voice recordings of my friends from videos and stuff like that: My manager Tom is on there, my friends Rico and Sam laughing about something, me and my friends screaming on the beach in Brighton.”