The first single from the album, “Ventolin”, out now on all digital platforms, is a stately dancefloor strut that could well be the first ever electro banger aimed at asthmatics.

“I’ve had asthma since I was a kid,” explains Maria of the song, which was the first one she wrote for the album late last year. “I thought I’d write something that my fellow respiratory-challenged crew could sway along to on the dancefloor without having to go to casualty. Big up the asthmatics!”

Along with guesting on recent albums by Chk! Chk! Chk! and Acid Klaus, Maria self-released a few low-key solo EPs as she worked her way towards Soft Cuts, which she describes as “a very loose concept album”.

“It’s based on a character’s journey from the cosmos into flesh being,” she continues. “At first there’s a sense of naivety and wonder, the joy of the child. But after a while on this planet things begin to dull and then contort that sense of joy and we lose sight of who we actually are.

“The album is about the journey from and then back to self-realisation. How do you keep a hold of your light in the face of adversity? How do you enable that child in your core to continue to shine when there’s so much around to bury it?”

The title comes from a similar place. Not just a play on words, alluding to the nine ‘cuts’ on the album, it’s also a reference to Maria’s experience as a black woman growing up in a predominantly white community. “I was faced with countless micro-aggressions on a daily basis, like death by a thousand cuts,” she says. “The album title is the trauma as a verb, the music within is the medicine.”

Maria Uzor plays the following live shows:

October 18 – London – Brixton Windmill
October 25 – Norwich – Voodoo Daddy’s Showroom

Get tickets HERE