Music
ANDREYA TRIANA
TEXT BY LILY MOAYERI
Sitting at a noisy café in the Brixton district of her hometown of
London, England, Andreya Triana is wearing a wide-brim hat
and smiling non-stop. She is as cute as a basket of puppies—and
just as irrepressible. The singer/songwriter is enjoying a rare
spell of not touring as she prepares for the tidal wave that is sure
to accompany the release of her second solo album, Giants.
It has been five years since Triana’s debut, Lost Where I Belong,
on Ninja Tune’s Counter Records imprint, but she has hardly
been dormant. Besides posting colorful shoe selfies at regular
intervals on her social media platforms, Triana’s soulful voice
is featured on two tracks from Bonobo’s best-received album,
2013’s North Borders. Triana spent months on end touring with
Bonobo as North Borders gained more and more momentum.
Meanwhile, cutting-edge DJ/Producer Breach remixed Triana’s
piano-driven ballad “Everything You Never Had”, the closing
track on Giants, far ahead of the album’s release. He turned the
song into a massive club hit and Triana into an unwitting EDM
über-diva. In the process, the track has two lives: as Breach’s
“Everything You Never Had (We Had It All)” featuring Andreya
Triana, and as Triana’s own song, “Everything You Never
Had Part II”.
“It was super cool how that happened,” Triana says of the
Breach correlation. Starring on other artists’ music is familiar
territory for Triana. Before her solo work, she found her way
onto Flying Lotus’ “Tea Leaf Dancers” and Mr. Scruff ’s “Hold
On” as well as the aforementioned Bonobo connection, which
began on his album, Black Sands. “Those guys do not compromise creatively,” Triana says. ”It’s tough to stand behind all the
music you create with outside pressures and people telling you
how things should be. That’s something I learned from them:
to have integrity and to believe in the music you love. They’re
really inspiring.”
Bonobo produced Triana’s Lost Where I Belong in his attic
in London befo