Lucinda Chua shares surprise EP Reclaiming the Rose

Lucinda Chua has shared a surprise EP called Reclaiming the Rose, her first follow-up to her debut studio album, March’s YIAN. The three-track tape follows its predecessor’s glacial, haunting aesthetic, adding spoken-word poetry to the London artist’s already-rich palette. The project arrives exactly a month after Chua’s announcement of her first U.S. headlining shows, which will take place in New York and Los Angeles in February. In the interim, she’s toured in Europe and Asia, including a show in Shanghai that allowed her to connect with her Chinese-Malaysian ancestry.

In her recent Gen F profile, Chua explained the importance of the rose in her work as a challenge to the narrative that the flower, which is indigenous to parts of Asia, represents a specifically English type of beauty. “I wanted the rose to become a metaphor for the Asian diaspora,” she says, “an icon we could reclaim as belonging to us equally, having its roots in our ancestral homeland but known and beloved across the world.” Reclaiming the Rose is a further development of that idea, ending on a duet with harpist Xiaoqiao that’s delivered in Mandarin.

“Following the release of YIAN, I had the opportunity to perform my music and connect with new audiences across Europe and Asia,” Chua says in a press release. “Reclaiming The Rose is a bi-lingual meditation exploring ideas of returning, remembering and retracing ancestral roots.”

Stream Reclaiming the Rose below.