Artist of the week: Greentea Peng, neo-soul queen

Greentea Peng

OMU, Glasgow

It comes as no surprise that Greentea Peng takes to the stage in Glasgow with the steely posture of an ancient queen. A certain regal bearing comes with the territory when you’re a south London singer steeped in the influence of neo-soul. That genre’s high priestess Erykah Badu often modelled a ramrod-straight back and hair wrappings as a kind of visual analogue to the consciousness and spirituality of her music.

Reggae, too, channels its own kind of righteous deportment; the Lion of Judah, after all, often wears a crown. Nourished by these influences, Greentea – born Aria Wells – settles on a squashy brown settee at the front of the stage, her hair covered in a beaded white headscarf; her expression unreadable, her presence undeniable.

A great track from her most recent album, Tel Dem It’s Sunny, released in March, doubles down on the feeling that Wells is plugged into a long line of seer artists, channelling certainties. “There are no insecure masters,” she intones on Tardis (Hardest), “No successful half-hearters/ Those willing to take on the task/ Require light for the inevitable darkness.”

Her band – five strong – supply jazz percussion, psychedelic guitar, dub echo and deep bass (electric and, aptly, upright). They can switch entire genres at the wave of an imperious hand from their singer. Wells and her musicians don’t come from the same scene, but there is distant, audible kinship here with other deep-rolling acts such as Ezra Collective, who draw on similar Caribbean musical vibrations.

Two songs later, though, Wells confesses she can’t actually move her neck or lift her arm. “A trapped nerve,” she mutters, slurping tea from a big mug. (Later, she’ll shout out the acupuncturist she saw earlier in the day.) The revelation that she’s styling out an injury does little to harsh the vibe of a singer in stately command of her sound and message.

If the settee serves as unofficial sixth member of the band tonight – Wells stands from time to time, then sits on its arms and back – pain  might be the seventh. With a grim kind of kismet, another Sunny track is called My Neck. It starts with the band conjuring up a shimmering, abstract mood and Wells rubbing her beads on her mic for extra vibes.

The song’s lyrics, meanwhile, detail her body’s physical ache at carrying so much emotional baggage around. “Shit he-heavy,” she confirms. On the languorous trip hop of Green – with cello from percussionist Edmund Adonis – she counsels: “There’s no other way than straight through”, like Lauryn Hill fronting Portishead. Everything may hurt, but the sounds coming off the stage are lush and saturated.

Arriving on the scene in 2018 with an EP, Sensi, named after a strain of marijuana, the impression of Greentea Peng as a kind of Rastafarian hippy throwback was confirmed by her 2021 debut album, Man Made. Galvanised by the pandemic, Black Lives Matter and the death of her stepfather, Wells’s disdain for the workings of Babylon shone as brightly as her look – roughly, high priestess meets flower child.

Greentea Peng released a 10-track mixtape, Greenzone 108, in 2022 – tonight we get the spacious Top Steppa from it, a tribute to her stepfather – but Tel Dem It’s Sunny is her second album proper. It deserves to be in the running for any award you care to name, finding the 30-year-old in a more self-questioning frame of mind.

While Wells can still be relied upon tonight to dedicate songs to the suffering in Palestine, the DRC, Sudan and Yemen, the album’s more memorable tracks often find her wondering where she goes wrong. “Is it too late for me?” she wonders on the anguished breakbeat shuffle of One Foot.

“Your love too good for me,” she mourns on the excellent Stones Throw, all heavy dread, “and I was too blind to see.” Comparisons with Amy Winehouse have followed her since Greentea Peng’s early days, but these more heartbroken songs confirm that Wells is no mere copyist, but rather a soul sister.

As the set winds on, she grows more physically confident. Things get looser. “The ibuprofen’s kicking in,” she confides, hazarding a grin. Her final few songs feature interpolations of tunes from the early 00s, the 90s and further back – a cameo from Scottish trip-hopper Finley Quaye’s Sunday Shining, an encore where Groove Armada’s Superstylin’ meets Shanks and Bigfoot’s Sweet Like Chocolate.

The highlight, though, is I Am (Reborn), featuring some gnarly guitar from the ever-versatile Alex Cosmo Blake – and Wells’s certainty that, although she is evolving, certain things remain constant. “Fuck a fickle pedestal, we cultivate vibration,” she sings. It’s all the more reason to give this singular artist her flowers.