In conversation with Amanda Reifer

Amanda Reifer radiates the kind of energy that makes you sit up a little straighter — not out of intimidation, but a certain self-confidence that she imparts on you. In person, she’s warm, grounded, and quick to laugh, yet there’s an unmistakable edge — she speaks her mind without hesitation, every word delivered with intention. In our conversation, it’s clear she pours a lot of love into everything she touches, from the music itself to the visuals, styling, and world-building around it.

Her sound defies easy labels, weaving pop, hip-hop, reggae, and soul into something rich, playful, and deeply felt. But behind the hooks and polished production is an artist who cares about how her work lands — how it makes people feel powerful, seen, and understood. She moves with confidence, but not bravado; her presence is expansive without ever feeling performative.

Reifer’s breakthrough moment came in 2022 when she collaborated with Kendrick Lamar on “Die Hard”, but now, she steps into her next era, taking her collaborators with her. The upcoming album The Reifer Files carries her spirit in every detail. To be in a room with her is to feel that same spirit: alive, unapologetic, and impossible to ignore. As she gave us a peek into her album for an intimate Glamcult TV performance, we also had a great pleasure to get a glimpse into her flourishing mind. 

Hey, lovely to meet you! Welcome to Amsterdam, how long have you been here for?
It’s my first four hours in Amsterdam! It’s so beautiful. I love it so much. I want to stay for at least a month. Everyone is so cool. The style is dope.

Stay! When do you have to get back?
I’m going back to London tonight, this is just a day trip. I’ve been there for a week already, and I love it there. London is actually the first city I ever lived in since I left Barbados. Just out of high school, I moved to London with my band. We got a record deal in the UK, and I lived there for a few years. It has a special place in my heart. It was also where my musical career and my musical roots started.

London is also such a diverse place sonically. How has living there influenced your sound?
My favourite part about London is that the whole world is in London. So many different types of people. So much different music. It’s all there. Coming from a small island like Barbados, it was amazing to experience so many different cultures. It really impacted me musically because I never felt restricted. I never felt in a box or like I had to diminish the musical roots of my country. Naturally, the band I was in, the first project we did was heavily Caribbean influenced. It was pop music. It was light. It was fun. That is ultimately what we knew. As life goes on, you have experiences. You have ups and downs. My sound has definitely evolved since I was a kid in that band. Now it’s a lot more diverse. Not only incorporating the Caribbean sounds, but I also the soul, hip-hop and R&B I grew up on. All of that has found its way into my music, especially living in other cities. It’s how I tell my stories. I like having a lot of mediums to work with. I also paint, and I’m a director and editor. The more mediums I can play in and use to express my thoughts or feelings, the better for me. 

I imagine it’s also about the combination of all these different creative processes that come with different mediums. How do you find the balance between nurturing those creative outlets without stretching yourself too thin?
I don’t know if I’m good at balance. I’m an all-or-nothing type of person. Balance is something I’m learning. For me, music has always been the centre of my choices. Even when I paint, it’s influenced by music. When I’m directing and editing my visuals, it’s all around the music I’m creating at the time. All of my choices seem to stem from my musical choices. That’s my creative hub. Songwriting is probably the core of it for me. I’ve been songwriting since I was 15. It’s my sharpest tool. When I record a song, I start to get a visual idea for that song. I might have a dream about it. I might see certain movements in dance or certain colours or just visual ideas. That’s where everything else comes from. 

I’m curious about the link of painting and music for you. How do they interact?
I paint to relax, it’s almost like meditation. When I’m making music, I’m really in touch with my feelings and my experiences. It’s a really emotionally involved process. Painting for me is a way to clear my mind. Let’s say, I’ve just worked on a song that maybe is about unconditional love, for instance. I will find that without thinking, when I’m painting, my mind is clear. That song I just worked on, I’ll create a piece that feels like that. Music, for sure, is my primary driver for my painting. Painting helps with my musical process too. When you’re painting and you have all these different shades and tones, and there’s the playing with dark and light and contrast… I find it’s the same way I approach songwriting as well. Making music is being able to pull from all of these different tones vocally. I paint with my voice in different ways to get different emotions across.

I love this parallel of layering paint and layering your voice! It feels like it’s powered by the same creative force from you.
With art, everyone has their own process. There’s no one way to do it. Even songwriting, I don’t have one way or one ritualistic way in which I write songs. The one thing I think all of my creativity has in common, though, is feeling. If I feel it and if it moves me, then I’m going to do it, and I know it’s right. I don’t have parameters that I try to work within because I think that’s just limiting. I try to just do what comes naturally, whatever that is. Next year, it might be something completely different. 

Yeah, everyone has such a different approach, and it’s such an intricate process to calibrate what works for you and what doesn’t.
I think that’s the beauty of art. Art is like the creators who make it. It’s complex and people are not one thing. Even in my upcoming album, The Reifer Files, the sounds are so different and varying, and the topics as well. I’m a complex person like you are. You’re experiencing many things. You hear that within the album. You hear the different flawed and beautiful parts of just being human.

Within that, have you ever found it challenging to keep your artistry so diverse? Has there been anything in your experience that tried to put you in a box in a way?
Yes. I’m a woman in music. I started in music when I was quite young, straight out of secondary school. The band I was in had a lot of success in the UK, very fast. It was kind of crazy. Initially, it was innocent and fun, but it was complicated being the only woman in the band. I faced a lot of personal censorship. The band represented one thing, but I was a young girl going through life, growing and changing. It was difficult to talk about the things that I wanted to speak about in the music when you’re speaking for four people. You’re representing a certain thing. It wasn’t easy, and there were a lot of things that were happening in the shadows. I didn’t even have control over what was happening for me financially or anything like that. While there were a lot of great things I learned in that period of time, it was definitely not…outwardly it was, but internally it was not a safe environment for me. When I finally started on a solo career, I spent some time just trying to regain my autonomy and my independence. Not only as an artist, but just as a young woman. It’s been so great to give myself that voice and reclaim the power and allow myself to make decisions, whether they’re right or wrong. And sometimes I do make some wrong decisions. But the fact that they’re my decisions really matters to me. I think that everyone should have the right to do that. 

Absolutely. To talk more about The Reifer Files, how are you feeling about its release?
The album is finished. It’s mixed and mastered. It’s ready. It’s been a long process in having it come out to the world. I’m very, very proud of this album. I poured so much of my life into it. I’ve been really blessed and privileged to work with amazing collaborators on this album. I’ve worked with Sounwave and Dahi. I’ve co-written the project with Kendrick Lamar. We have J. Pounds on there. Just really incredibly talented musicians and artists that I’ve always admired. When I found myself after working on Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers in a position to continue creating with them, I was so grateful and willing to just be a sponge and learn as much as I can. In prior experiences I had in the band and stuff, I felt like my voice wasn’t always heard in the room. What I found really beautiful now, is that when we were making this album, these incredible men gave me so much space as a woman in the room to tell my stories and to put my creative ideas forward. We have a whole visual album that we’ve shot back home in Barbados as well. 

Nice. I’m curious to know more about what was it like to work with Kendrick? How was your studio process in general?
Wow. I’m still honoured, to be honest. He’s a master. When I was invited to work on Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, it was shortly after I had met him at a studio session and he had heard some of my work. He really just said, your pen is dope. He admired my pen. He offered to come work on the album, but I didn’t even know it was going to happen. I was just grateful that he lent an ear to what I had been working on. So when the call came for me to actually go work on the album, I was kind of sick from nervousness because these are great, great, great, great masters of their craft. I still feel like I’m learning. I still feel like I’m at the feet of all of my people that inspire me. We got there and we worked on Die Hard, which was a great experience. He’s very particular and has vision, of course. It’s for him to speak about his process, but for my process, it often started with conversations about life, about thoughts and perspectives. It was really interesting to have the male and the female perspectives in the room. These songs are definitely almost like a 360 understanding of situations. They’re very conversational. The songwriting style is almost as if I’m talking to someone. 

What’s the biggest thing you’ve learnt in that process?
I think the biggest thing that’s continued with me is to let go of judgement. I used to sometimes overanalyse what I was writing. Now I’m in a place where I almost freestyle everything I write. I just let it come and I say what I want to say without trying to filter it. I think that definitely came from working with those guys, that freedom of expression.

It also sounds like something that comes from building your own confidence and sense of creative autonomy.
Yeah, and it was very confidence-building to have Sounwave and Dahi and Kendrick listen to your ideas and embrace them as a young artist. That is great validation. Not that you should need it, but it helps when you’ve been working at something for a very long time and it hasn’t always been easy. To feel heard and seen by people that great is definitely special. I cherish that experience.

That does sound very special! I want to talk about the songs that you performed today. I’m especially curious about In and Out and the inspiration behind it.
In and Out is an interlude off of the album that’s coming. It’s one of the first songs for the album. I had been studying the Haitian Revolution right beforehand. It’s very intense, but it was one of the greatest underdog stories of all time for what they were able to achieve, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines… No one saw it coming.
I think that it resonated with me because as artists, we put so much work into what we do, and people don’t see it. They just see the final thing. They don’t see the struggle and the lack of resources and all the creativity you have to come up with to make something happen. All the sacrifices and favours that go into a project or music or a visual or a piece. To me, that reference was really inspiring. A lot of my life I felt a little bit like an underdog. It kind of found its way into In and Out and I referenced that a lot. It’s also about being observant and being in this world of music but not necessarily of it. Having enough perspective to learn and have wisdom and apply the experiences you’re having. Being able to take a step back and really look at my life and the world I’m in and the things that I want to be a part of and things I don’t want to be a part of. It’s a culmination of that. It’s like being a champion of the underdog, being in something but not necessarily of it. You’re in and out of it.

It also sounds like your music is so self-reflective and you’re able to connect with your emotions without becoming them necessarily. Like observing yourself also.
Yeah, exactly! I definitely am interested in the human psyche and how our mind and our emotions work. For me, taking a step back and looking at my life or looking at the things I’m experiencing has always helped me. Putting that into my music is really important. It helps me to write, actually. In and Out is definitely kind of like an observer’s point of view, but you’re observing your own. When I write songs, I’m not thinking about all of that. It just comes through me and then I realise what has unfolded. I’m not always aware of my own mind sometimes, but my music helps me see my mind.

I imagine it’s a two-way street in a way that music helps you get insight into your mind, but also, of course, your mind helps you hear your music.
They work in tandem. I also always think that music, once you’ve listened to it, it becomes yours. How you hear it and what it’s going to do for you or say to you is going to be different, even maybe from what I wrote. I think the beauty of art is that it affects everyone differently and everyone’s entitled to their own story within the story. I really hope when people listen to my music, it tells a story for them. 

It clearly does! Do you have a lyric that you connect with strongly at this moment?
There’s so many on this album. This is a hard one. I have a song called Fate. In the verse, I say, freedom ain’t nothing worth the cost of my freedom. Anybody challenge that thought, I bleed them. Any hesitation or fear, I read them. Keep your limitations over there. I don’t need them. That in summary is almost a motto for me. I remember a period of my life where I felt like I didn’t have freedom and I didn’t have autonomy to, like I said, make my own choices and live my life. I think for me, the key is for people to feel like they have their own personal freedom. I will fight for it. It’s an aggressive verse because I mean it. What else is another one that I can think of… 

Maybe something that encapsulates how you’re feeling after the performance?
I find Amsterdam very romantic. I’m thinking about Devastating, which I just performed. Devastating is an interesting song because it’s about something being so good that devastates what you thought of before or thought something was from before.
For me, I’m thinking of Amsterdam kind of devastating. The other places I think are amazing or beautiful. This is new on my list of comparisons of places I think are really great.
Devastating, I love that song. I had a friend who basically whenever anything was good, she would say, oh, it’s devastating. This ice cream is so good, it’s devastating. It found its way into the song because I was writing about someone I was interested in and I knew that if anything happened between us, it would be so good. It would be devastating and that’s how Devastating happened. Devastating can be a good thing in that it makes you rethink what you thought about something. It needs to be shaken. 

On a final note, what are you manifesting for the rest of the year?
I’m manifesting my album being released for sure. I’m manifesting just connecting with more people. I love what I do and I love to do it for myself but I think what I love even more is the way it could possibly impact other people and add to their lives. I think about the artists that I’ve always admired. I think about Amy Winehouse, Sister Nancy, Roberta Flack, Lauryn Hill, Sade. The way that all of those artists have added to my life with their songs and helped me to understand my own feelings and experiences and inspired me just by being who they are. I want to contribute something like that to the world.