EP Review - Deva Mahal - Future Classic Volume II: Future
Deva Mahal - image provided
Review By: Faith Hamblyn
Artist Name: Deva Mahal
Album Name: Future Classic Volume II: Future
Label: Motema Music
Release Date: 27th March 2026
Deva Mahal - Future Classic Volume II: Future
Deva Mahal is in a soulful, sensual, self-love mode on her new EP, Future Classic Volume II: Future. First track South Coast is earthy, a song about grounding yourself, channelling the wind-and-grind of reggae and the strident self-belief that we heard in TLC’s hip-hop era. It’s nicely produced, cinematic and enveloping, and sounds like Deva’s contemplation among the waves of Aotearoa’s shores, with the ebb and flow of tides, moons, water and the wash of thoughts that haunt us of those we love and we miss and we can’t keep our minds off.
This infatuation mood continues in second track Need. While Deva was pondering whether or not she could trip and fall in lust with the last someone, here she just plain needs them. It’s a rich single from the EP, where it’s spelled out strong and slow what the situation is — Deva is bathed in breathy backing vocals and a heavy bassline, calling for her lover like Diana Ross in her most laboured time of need. There’s a break in her vocal that’s like the hook of Motown - in amongst the echo-y whispery entreats in French, there’s a diva that needs to be heard and doesn’t sound like she could be resisted, like a siren calling from the sea. There’s no question of playing games or playing for keeps - just a serious bassline.
Sometimes Good is like Secrets-era Toni Braxton, a little husky, pouting and playfully pop. Mahal is in a situation with a bad boy, and there’s regret, but it sounds like she’s already halfway out the door. By the bridge, she’s made up her mind that it’s not worth it. But the chemistry is strong, the rhyme is like something known that will always be proved right - burn once, burn me nice; a fool lets you burn me twice. Things have gone wrong, and that’s a known risk of love, but it’s not so bad that you have to go full Beyonce,... at least not just yet.
Till The Morning Comes has a South American flavour, like a slow bossa nova dance in the warm evening with a stranger, but nothing lasting — they’re supposed to be not catching feels. This never works — has never worked, in the whole of musical history, surely — so there’s a country regret sound to Deva Mahal’s vocal, a weary inevitability. It’s just having a stranger in your arms for the length of a song or a night, but chances are someone’s gone by sunup. Bonnie Raitt covered how this not-in-love scenario shakes out, but this is a song about the time before, bodies melting into each other and swaying, just warmth and heat and rhythm.
Penultimate song Slow Down is R&B regret, that old tale of taking a wrong turn, with funk percussion, licks of bright electric guitar and the night closing in around Deva’s warning. Hopefully she can expand on this dark noir world in her next full-length recording. It has the sound of people fleeing and danger. It’s Tracy Chapman-style songwriting — intrigue and highways beckoning people at the end of their rope is always where the best stories come from.
Closing track Someone’s Daughter will break your heart. All the hope for a better life for a child builds in the verses, building to a soaring jazz-shouter height. Deva Mahal has a turn of phrase as a singer that calls to mind Amy Winehouse, but it’s much fuller, more in the vein of Aretha Franklin. But the hurt evoked here feels just as big — not someone’s daughter, or wife, or mother; ‘someone’s daughter’ is, first of all, someone.
RATING: 4 Stars
