Anna Wise is ready for her close-up.
After a few stints collaborating with Kendrick Lamar — including last year’s “These Walls” and “Institutionalized”, off the rapper’s essential and Grammy-nominated To Pimp A Butterfly record — the Berklee-trained singer of Boston-born/New York-based duo Sonnymoon has this week dropped her debut single. Titled “Precious Possession”, it’s a soulful, engaging piece of minimal alt-pop.
For Wise, the new single, which does a lot in its deliberate gestures and mindful seduction, is like her child. She tweets: “im so excited and happy rn !! my baby is being born!!” And even Lamar is feeling it, throwing his public support behind the track.
Speaking of the rapper, Wise revealed in an interview with Billboard last year how she first met up with Lamar, working with him on his 2012 sophomore record good kid, m.A.A.d city, and then on last year’s breakout, To Pimp A Butterfly, of which she provides backing vocals throughout. Turns out Lamar found her by watching Sonnymoon’s “Nursery Boys” video on YouTube.
“I was on a road trip with my bandmate [in Sonnymoon] Dane Orr in 2011,” she told Billboard, “we were driving across the country — and Kendrick found me on the internet, asked around for my number and started texting me. We were texting back and forth, and then we just decided to reroute our road trip down to Compton. Dane and I showed up maybe like a week later, and we lived there in the houses they had set up at the time, the recording studio — we just stayed there and we worked for like, many, many weeks in a row. It was really cool… As soon as we entered the room, we just knew that it was going to work out between us creatively — like love at first sight, but creatively.”
Kind of how we feel about this new single.