By Sydney Wills

For a long time, Kareen Lomax worked behind the scenes. Her musical accolades have revolved around collaboration with artists such as Diplo, Leon Bridges, Maroon 5, and Syd; the songwriting that she was quietly conducting earned her spots on charts around the world. With her debut solo album NAJI, which was created over the course of several years alongside producer Daoud, she takes on the task of creating a world around her voice rather than figuring out where it could fit within someone else’s.

In conversation with SoundFynd, she describes the process as both freeing and a little fear-inducing, particularly as she and Daoud worked to establish the album’s sonic identity through crate digging and playing “roulette” with different musical ideas. This sense of discovery extends beyond the production itself — NAJI is also an attempt to understand the different parts of Lomax herself — from the distinction she once felt between “Kareen” and “Naji” to working through the different spaces that grief occupies for her over time.

Read below to see Lomax speak candidly about the process of stepping into this task: growing up in Atlanta and learning from artists like OutKast that experimentation and Southern identity could coexist with pop appeal, learning how to collaborate without losing her own instincts, and discovering that the voice she had spent years fitting into other people’s songs could be the thing around which an entire world was built.

Sydney Wills: Though you’re based in LA now, I saw that you’re originally from Atlanta. Both cities have incredibly rich and distinct music scenes, but Atlanta in particular has such a deep musical lineage, from Southern hip hop and the rise of trap to the city’s influence on R&B, soul, and pop over the last few decades. Growing up there, do you feel like that musical environment shaped your relationship to music and your own artistic identity? And do you feel that Atlanta’s influence finds its way into the music you make, even now that you’re based in LA?

Kareen Lomax: Definitely. Growing up in Atlanta, artists like OutKast showed me that you could be completely left of center and still have pop appeal. You could experiment, pull from different genres, be weird, be Southern, and still make something that connected with everybody. I think that freedom has always stayed with me, even if the music I make doesn’t immediately sound like “Atlanta.”

SW: This is your debut album, so most write-ups about you up to this point focus on your collaboration with others, Syd, Diplo, and Leon Bridges among those ranks. You’ve been a voice inside others’ projects for many years, but NAJI is explicitly framed as the first time you get to tell your own story on this scale. The press release also says that you recorded the project yourself, primarily from home studios. After spending so much of your career stepping into other artists’ worlds, did that collaborative way of working carry over into the making of NAJI, or did it feel refreshing to have a project that was so distinctly your own?

KL: I recorded myself for the entire project, and I think that added even more of a handmade quality to it. With NAJI, I got to build the world first and decide what belonged in it. It was still really collaborative, especially with Daoud, but the center of it was always my story.

SW: With that, I’m curious whether making NAJI changed your relationship to collaboration at all. Did you find yourself craving other voices in the process, or did having a project that was entirely yours make you want to protect that sense of singularity?

KL: I think it actually taught me how to collaborate without losing myself in the collaboration. I’ve spent so much of my career stepping into other people’s worlds, so with NAJI I became a lot more protective of my instincts and what felt true to me. I still love other voices in the room, but I think I know my own voice a lot better now.

SW: What is an early experience with music that feels important to you?

KL: Finding my mom’s old 45s and vinyl records in my parents’ basement. I remember going through them and feeling like I’d found this whole world that existed before me. I think that was one of my earliest experiences of music feeling like discovery.

SW: What were you listening to a lot of throughout the process of working on NAJI specifically?

KL: Daoud and I did a lot of crate digging. He’s kind of an encyclopedia of music, so sometimes we’d start the writing day with me saying, “I want to make something with horns,” or “I want a bossa record,” and we’d just go down a rabbit hole listening to old records. That’s how I got into finds like Ebo Taylor during the process. Daoud also comes from sample-making, so songs like “Self Care” and “Somewhere in the World,” with that classic vinyl, 70s soul feeling, are really instinctual for him.

A lot of NAJI came from us playing roulette with different sounds and seeing where they took us.

Kareen Lomax

SW: Were there sounds you actively avoided early on? Sounds you didn’t identify with?

KL: I think early on I knew more about what I didn’t want than what I did. I’d spent years hearing my voice in a lot of dance and electronic music, and I knew I genuinely didn’t want to make that record yet or at the time. But I didn’t want to trade one box for another either. A lot of the process was figuring out what actually felt like me.

SW: You describe Kareen and Naji almost like two voices within yourself—Kareen as the more emotional and reflective side, and Naji as the more direct and confrontational one. There’s something interesting about making an album about becoming whole while also describing yourself as having lived with this sense of being divided between two names. Did you find yourself writing certain songs specifically from one side of yourself? Do you feel like making NAJI brought those two selves closer together?

KL: I don’t think I ever sat down and thought, “this is a Kareen song” or “this is a Naji song.” I recognized those different sides of myself more as the album started taking shape. And I do think making it brought them closer together. I realized they’re not really two separate versions of me — they’re just different parts of the same person.

SW: You have a very recognizable voice, and you’ve spent years having that voice placed inside all kinds of different musical worlds. When you were making this record, did you find yourself building the production around your voice differently because it was finally your own world?

KL: I think Daoud did a great job of leaving space for my voice, especially on the later songs once we really landed on the sonic identity of the record. There was definitely something a little fear-inducing about building my own world, but there was also a lot of freedom in it. I wasn’t trying to figure out where my voice fit anymore. We were building something around it and it became what made the album cohesive.

SW: There are titles like “adulting,” “apartment,” “self care / flowers,” and “somewhere in the world” that feel almost diaristic. Did you want the album to preserve those small, everyday details alongside the bigger themes of grief and identity?

KL: Yeah, I think it was intentional. I feel like that’s naturally just the way that I write, but—

I also think there’s a certain vulnerability missing from a lot of music right now. Not everybody, obviously, but I wanted to make sure that vulnerability was in this record. I wanted to talk about the things that maybe aren’t always easy or cool to say out loud.

Kareen Lomax

SW: Your album came out of the loss of your adopted sister and your father, but the record seems interested in what happens after the immediate experience of grief. There’s a difference between writing about something while you’re living through it and writing about it once you’ve had some distance from it. Where do you feel NAJI sits between those two?

KL: I think NAJI sits in both places. Some of the earlier songs were written right in the middle of it, not long after my dad died. I had also just moved across the country, and I was trying to understand profound loss while realizing that everybody around me grieved differently. I had to figure out where there was space for my grief in all of that.

The later songs have more distance in them. They’re less about then and more about who I became afterward — how grief changed the way I thought about love, belonging, spirituality, even myself. So I think you can actually hear time passing on the record.

SW: What are you most looking forward to now that NAJI is out? What’s next for you?

KL: I think I’m most excited that it’s not mine anymore. I spent years with these songs, and now I get to watch people find their own favorites and make their own memories with them. I definitely don’t look at release day as the finish line either. I want NAJI to have a really long life. So next is playing these songs live, making more visuals, and continuing to build the world around the album. And then eventually, making whatever comes next.