Considering she’s today sporting a baseball cap emblazoned with the slogan “Have u cum yet today?” it’s not a huge shock to hear that Hawa has never held back discussing her sex life. Coming out to her devout Muslim mother at 13, she led with an abrupt “I eat pussy,” an overshare that – unsurprisingly – didn’t go down brilliantly. “Now I think about it, maybe she didn’t need to know all that,” the New York-based rapper, singer and sometime model laughs. “Saying ‘I’m gay’ would probably have been enough.” It is this unfiltered approach that the 21-year-old applies to her songwriting, setting explicit experiences and carnal fantasies to a dreamy mix of R&B, drill and hip-hop that also draws deeply on her Guinean roots, where she spent much of her early childhood. West Africa is still where she feels most at home, despite having now spent more time living in New York than she ever did in Guinea-Conakry. It was there that Hawa first resolved to become a musician, following the lead of her uncle who remains a star of the country’s coupé-décalé dance music scene. When she was 10 she was invited to participate in the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young Composer Programme. Acing the course, she went on to become the prestigious orchestra’s youngest ever composer, before quitting at the age of 15. “I was just like: ‘Fuck this, I’m going to focus on the sound that I want to make,’” she explains. “When you think about it, I couldn’t make gay music in the Philharmonic. I mean, imagine me having a whole orchestra playing in the background while I’m singing about how I want to fuck all these women.” Her first big break as a solo artist came in January 2020, when she sang at Telfar’s Pitti Uomo fashion show before a front row featuring Solange and Kelela. Two months later she shared her acclaimed debut EP. Drawing on inspirations that ranged from D’Angelo to bashment, Stevie Wonder to the traditional Susu music of her upbringing, The One was released via b4. Now signed to sister label 4AD, she’s just shared Wake Up, a standalone track that finds her chastising a previous partner over buoyant Afrobeats. “It’s basically me being petty,” she chuckles. Hawa is now putting the finishing touches to an as yet untitled album, tentatively scheduled for release in the autumn. Although she’s reluctant to share too much about it yet, she does reveal that it features a collaboration with the experimental producer Eartheater and that, thematically, it focuses on her struggles with fidelity. “I do get in trouble a lot, so that’s probably why,” she grins, before shrugging. “I’m a gay woman who loves talking about sex.”