Mulaa Joans

A window in Bath

Mulaa Joans grew up in Bath and moved to London to pursue music. She has said her parents supplied the first record collection: drum and bass, Michael Jackson and Prince from one side of the house, Pink Floyd and Prince again from her father, and a mother who sang to her every night and still sings with her now. The records she names as her own touchstones are an odd and telling mix for a pop singer of her age: Passenger's All the Little Lights, James Brown's The Boss, Rihanna's Anti and Billie Eilish's Don't Smile at Me.

The start of the public story is a window. In her early teens she began posting cover versions on TikTok, filmed from her bedroom window, and a cover of Etta James was the one that travelled. Thousands of followers arrived to hear her sing other people's songs before she had released one of her own. She has been candid that there was no formal vocal training in those years because the family could not afford it, and she treats that as a strength rather than a gap. In a January 2026 interview she put it plainly: she was not put in a cage and bound by technical rules, and that is why the voice sounds like hers. She has since taken up training to protect the instrument for recording and touring.

She does not play an instrument. Her process, as she described it to LE MILE in May 2026, is to sit by the window, work melody ideas over beats found on YouTube, often sparked by a storyline from a film or television programme, then take the fragments into a professional session and shape them with instrumentalists.

Seventy pounds for peace of mind

Her debut EP, £70 For Peace Of Mind, appeared in 2024. The title is the kind of blunt, transactional phrase that runs through her writing, and the record is usually described as confessional. Its breakthrough track, Still a Little Something, is the one her label, NWS Music Group, still points to as the moment listeners outside the UK started paying attention. Members Only followed as another early favourite.

A second EP, Nighttime Religion, came out in October 2025 and drew warmer press than the first. It was around this period that Love Letter took off. By spring 2026 the song had been streamed more than 26 million times and, according to LE MILE, had been used in over 50,000 posts on TikTok, where her own following passed 400,000. Asked why that song in particular connected, she said the lyrics are so blunt and honest that they say what people are usually too scared to say. Birthday Makeup, released in the spring of 2026, became the second single to move into the millions.

The influences she names in interviews have widened as the catalogue has: Jorja Smith, The Weeknd, SZA and Billie Eilish sit alongside newer British peers such as Sienna Spiro and Skye Newman. The common thread is a preference for direct, spoken-sounding lyrics over R&B-inflected melody, which is where her records sit.

Her deal is through North West Sound Recordings in partnership with Atlantic Records, and she has been backed by BBC Introducing in the West, which made her its Artist of the Week.

That Ain't You, the surprise EP

On 14 August 2026, with no advance campaign, she released a third EP led by the single That Ain't You. The EP gathers the run of singles from the previous year, Normal People, Parallel Lines, Phone Sex, Birthday Makeup and Love Letter, around the new title track.

That Ain't You was written in Lisbon with Max Wolfgang, and its origin is the most revealing detail about how she works. She said the session began as an attempt to write her first ever love song, and that the pair flipped it partway through into something closer to a warning. The production leans on gospel voicings, a first for her, and the empowering, clear-eyed tone marks a shift from the more wounded writing on the first two EPs. Phone Sex, released as a single in January 2026, had already shown her willingness to lead with a title that makes radio programmers hesitate.

By the time the EP landed her combined streams had passed 60 million.

Where she stands in September 2026

On 7 September 2026 Capital named her its Buzz Artist for September, a slot that brings an on-air interview, daytime radio play and billboard advertising around the UK. It is the most mainstream endorsement of her career so far and arrived in the same week as her first headline dates outside London.

The radio push follows a summer that doubled as a public audition. She spent the spring opening for Sekou on his UK tour, sold out her own show at Hoxton Hall in London on 23 May 2026, and was booked for Leeds Festival on 28 August and Reading on 30 August. New Wave magazine, writing in September, called her one of the UK's brightest stars at the moment, which is as strong a line as any British music title has given her.

The picture, then, is of an artist at the point where the numbers already exist and the live audience is catching up. Three EPs, no album yet, a major-label partner, and a first tour with her own name at the top of the poster.

From Sekou's opener to her own name on the poster

Her live experience before 2026 was mostly support slots and scattered headline nights. Her account of the Sekou tour, given to LE MILE, is the most detailed description of the shows that exists in print: an Amsterdam headline date she called the most memorable moment of her career, a fan meet-up in the same city, a Paris show, a night in Brussels, a radio session for Belgium's QMusic, and soundchecks with a keyboard player named Kent. What struck her most was hearing audiences abroad sing back lyrics from songs she had not yet released.

The festival slots in August 2026 were early ones. At Reading she played The Gallery stage at midday on Sunday 30 August for a 30-minute set, the length that new signings are given.

The headline tour that followed, billed on Live Nation listings as The Scarlet Mafia Tour, opened at King Tut's Wah Wah Hut in Glasgow on 8 September 2026 and runs through Birmingham on 10 September, Gorilla in Manchester on 11 September and Village Underground in London on 14 September, before crossing to Ideal Bar in Copenhagen on 19 September, Postkontoret in Oslo on 20 September, Debaser Nova in Stockholm on 21 September, Berlin on 23 September and La Boule Noire in Paris on 25 September. These are club rooms of a few hundred capacity, chosen for an artist whose streaming audience is far larger than her ticket-buying one so far. Ticket agencies were not showing a support act at the time of writing, and no full-length reviews of the September dates had yet been published.