Simran Sultana brings serious confidence to a steamy, bass-heavy R&B cut built for the dancefloor.
I did the shallow thing first and checked Simran Sultana’s Instagram.
And to be fair, sometimes you can tell pretty quickly when an artist has a strong sense of who they are. Not because the photos are good, but because the music, visuals, clothes and general attitude all feel connected.
Sultana has that.
SOMA has it. VASSY has it. Tkay Maidza definitely has it. That sense that the music isn’t being made separately from everything around it — there’s already a clear identity taking shape.
That’s particularly nice to see in Australia, where we’re very good at producing indie rock, bedroom pop and increasingly weird electronic music, but perhaps a little less used to emerging R&B and pop artists coming through with this much confidence from the outset.
‘HOT, FEMME WITH LOTS OF $$$’ makes the point pretty quickly.
The lead-in to Sultana’s forthcoming EP Too Late is steamy, bass-heavy and very much made for a dancefloor.
Produced primarily by Jess Heeney, with additional production from Sultana herself, it pulls from amapiano, Latin rhythms, electronic production and early-2000s R&B without feeling too crowded.
There are flashes of the kind of big R&B production Beyoncé does so well — mostly in the way the track uses space and bass rather than trying to fill every second.
Sultana’s vocal sits comfortably over all of it.
“Tall, dark, funny, honey, hot femme with lots of money” is also just a very good line.
Her delivery shifts between sultry and playful, but there’s a confidence running through the whole thing.
This isn’t really a song about wanting someone’s attention. Sultana sounds more interested in working out whether they’re worth hers.
There are Arabian vocal inflections woven through the R&B and dance production too, giving the track another layer without making a big deal out of it.
That combination is probably the most interesting thing here. Sultana isn’t trying to flatten all of her influences into something more easily categorised. She’s letting them sit alongside each other.
And it works.
She has already played The Vanguard and Oxford Art Factory, picked up a triple j Red Drum feature, and is becoming more involved in production herself. But ‘HOT, FEMME WITH LOTS OF $$$’ probably tells you more than any bio does.
It sounds confident, considered and like she knows exactly what kind of artist she wants to be.
Anyway, this is now firmly in the getting-ready-for-the-weekend rotation.
If Too Late has a few more tracks like this on it, Sultana could be onto something very good.
Listen to ‘HOT, FEMME WITH LOTS OF $$$’ here.
