Ears Wide Open: Amindi

Hanh Truong on September 3rd, 2020

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Twenty-year-old Amindi (fka Amindi K. Fro$t) is blending genres and making waves for a third time this year with today’s release of the buttery alt-pop tune “Text,” a collaboration with Australian producer UNO Stereo (Nic Martin).

Hailing from Inglewood, Amindi and her warm vocals were heard throughout the globe with her 2017 hit single, “Pine & Ginger,” a collaboration with Tessellated and Valleyz. The pop-dancehall track is an ode to her Jamaican roots and it garnered over 25 million streams.

“It was frustrating at first being just the ‘Pine & Ginger girl,’ because I felt like I was so much more,” the artist says on her website. “I am more than just one thing, but not everybody knows that yet. And I have no problem with taking my time proving that.”

And she did just that. Fighting through the pressure to make carbon copies of her breakout song, she has released multiple tracks that fuse R&B, soul, alt-pop, reggae and dancehall.

Amindi’s most recent EP, “Minztape,” features her vulnerable side, along with softer beats. The mini-project came out in July and houses three songs that were formerly on her Soundcloud, including the dreamy “Cocoa Butter Shawty.”

Written in 2016, when she was only 16, “Cocoa Butter Shawty” is that song that’s meant to be blaring in the car during late-night drives, as worries are thrown out the window and replaced with musings that every person passing by is probably entangled in their own complex web of life. Having a sonder is what that’s called, according to John Koenig, and this is the best soundtrack for those thoughts.

“Minztape” followed January’s dancehall-inspired bop “Love Em Leave Em,” a collaboration with fellow Angeleno Kari Faux that was featured in the film “Like a Boss.”

“Text” offers a slightly different side of Amindi. It’s dancey but tinged with heartache, as Amindi croons, “I won’t say I miss you, even though it’s facts / ’Cause I got all these issues and you won’t text me back,” after an airy saxophone intro. The three minutes feature low-key, jazzy instrumentals intertwined with a quirky melody.

She says collaborating with UNO Stereo — a Grammy-nominated producer who has worked with the likes of Wale, Denzel Curry and Khalid and who himself released the “Innerludes” EP this summer — was “effortless and magical.”

Says Martin: “‘Text’ was literally the first beat I played Amindi in our first session, (and) we both kinda agreed the beat felt like walking around Paris at night. Her natural instinct was to write melodies that interweaved between the beat, rather than sit directly on each bar, which attributed to the song’s overall jazzy-ness even more. I think also adding that little echoed-out horn sample (Pete Rock shoutout) was the icing on the cake.”

“Text” is painfully relatable, as she croons about not wanting to be alone, but would rather stubbornly sink into lonely sorrow than to be the first one to pick up the phone. Her fresh vocals make the song almost like a wake-up-call to just suck it up and send a text. Animated visuals for the track come courtesy of Chris and Andrew Yee.

Amindi is at work on a new EP, with a fresh single possibly arriving before the end of the year.

||| Stream: “Text”