Ntjam Rosie - Home Cooking (2022) [Hi-Res]

Since the release of the critically acclaimed album “Elle” in 2010, Ntjam Rosie, born in Cameroon in 1983, has built a loyal fan base in the Netherlands and abroad. For Ntjam Rosie, music was literally everything in her life. But over the years, her partnership and role as a mother made her realise that there is more to life than music. This awareness is apparent on the 2020 album “Family & Friends” – a musical cocktail of soul, pop, jazz, R&B, but with more funk and groovy Afro influences than on her previous album “Breaking Cycles” from 2017.

For her new album “Home Cooking” (release April 29th 2022 / o-tone music), she drew even more inspiration from her home country Cameroon. The album feels like a homecoming: back to the roots. In the midst of the pandemic, she plucked up the courage, overcame her fear and recorded an album completely alone from her home. And this forced stillness, the pause, gave her inner voice the space to unfold and return back to her roots. Rosie decided to “cook up” a body of work based on the feeling she knows from her home country. “But my heart longs for the life I left behind…” she sings in the song EFAS ME NGA SÓ. It is about the feeling of longing for and the feeling of being at home, legacy, loss and intimacy. It conveys a feeling of warmth and familiar security. The 11 songs go deep: warm harmonies, acoustic sounds, earthy rhythms and melancholic, playful vocal infelctions. Linked by interludes that explain where she comes from. She breaks away from her rather poppy, soul-infused sound of recent albums, and finds herself in a very personal, world-music sound universe.

Ntjam Rosie does not strive for perfection in her music, but for vulnerability. We thus come to enjoy the wonderfully rootsy album inspired by her grandmother’s voice, her family and the deliciousness that is home cooked food, all based on how Rosie feels in her home country of Cameroon. Music is like food, it heals the soul.