One of L.A.’s most promising young musicians can trace her career back to the moment she decided to run away from home.
Or did her mom kick her out?
“It’s hard to explain,” Alemeda says.
Growing up in a strict Islamic household in Phoenix, Rahema Alameda — the singer changed the spelling of her stage name to boost her internet searchability — was in constant conflict with her mother over school, religion and the pop music she was all but forbidden from listening to as a kid.
When she was 17, Alemeda recalls, “we got into a huge fight — stuff that had just built up till that moment — and I was like, ‘You know what? I’m leaving.’ Then she did this weird thing where she called the cops on me but also changed the locks and moved to Africa.” She laughs.
“I swore on the Quran that I was never coming back.”
In fact, Alemeda would later go some way toward repairing their relationship: On a recent afternoon, she’s just returned to L.A. from a visit with her family in Arizona. But seven years after she left home, she takes a philosophical view of her adolescent turmoil.
“If my mom didn’t treat me the way she did, I wouldn’t have left,” says Alemeda, who’s now 25. “And if I’d never left, I would never have gotten signed.”
That signing was a deal with Top Dawg Entertainment, home to the Grammy-winning likes of SZA and Doechii and the label that launched Kendrick Lamar to superstardom. Last week, TDE and Warner Records released “But What the Hell Do I Know,” a killer seven-track EP by Alemeda that shows off a bold new voice in Gen Z pop.
Over the woozy guitars of “Losing Myself,” she sings about disappearing into a toxic relationship — “I’m just a heart for your arrow” — while “Happy With You” contemplates her reflex for self-sabotage. In “Beat a B!tch Up,” Alemeda and Doechii trade ride-or-die assurances in an explosive Warped Tour-style chorus.
“But What the Hell Do I Know” is funny and biting and loaded with hooks. Yet the EP closes with a gut-punch of a ballad, “I’m Over It,” about losing someone to addiction. “Kicked back, laughing in a Camry / Talking ’bout how we hate our families,” Alemeda sings, her voice trembling with emotion, before she spools forward to more painful memories: “I held your hair, I flushed your drugs / You took the love, I took the hit.”
The song, which in its dramatic precision ranks up there with stuff by Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, is a major emotional achievement for Alemeda, who was “very nonchalant about music in the beginning,” she says at TDE’s headquarters in Studio City. She’s wearing low-rise jeans and a paisley-print top and sips an espresso after the six-hour drive from Phoenix.
“I was just trying to escape my household,” she adds. “But I think I’ve healed a lot through writing about all the things I went through.”
Though TDE made its name in hip-hop and R&B, Alemeda’s music places her in a clear pop-punk lineage with Paramore, Avril Lavigne and Ashlee Simpson. “Stupid Little Bitch,” which ponders her tensions with her mom, puts her breathy vocals against frayed acoustic strumming; “Chameleon,” which features Alemeda’s pal Rachel Chinouriri, has booming drums and a fuzzed-out guitar solo.
“I love how grungy she is,” says Chinouriri, who toured with Alemeda earlier this year.
Both artists are part of a growing number of women of color making alternative rock — think also of Beabadoobee, whom Alemeda singles out as a fave — in an era when streaming and social media have dismantled some of the old orthodoxies regarding genre and identity.
Some, but not all: “I don’t know if it’s the world or just the music industry, but it feels like there’s a ceiling that we haven’t cracked,” Alemeda says. Chinouriri agrees. “I’ll speak to white artists about their struggles, and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s a struggle I haven’t even gotten to yet,’” she says. “I’m still trying to get over the first struggle.”
Alemeda was born in Chicago but spent a portion of her elementary-school years in Ethiopia, where her mother is from. (Her dad is from Sudan.) She moved with her family to Phoenix around fifth grade, which felt like “coming to a different world,” she says now, even as her consumption of American music was limited to what she could hear on the Disney Channel and on her analog clock radio.
“I didn’t even know the race of any person I was listening to,” she says. “Except for Beyoncé. I knew Beyoncé was Black.”
Alemeda performs in August in London.
(Jim Dyson / Getty Images)
Alemeda describes herself as “a ghost” in high school. “No one even knew what my voice sounded like,” she says. “I used to wear the hijab, and I feel like when you wear that, it’s already intimidating, especially if you’re not around other Muslim people. So people don’t approach you or talk to you unless they have to.”
She graduated early amid the climactic blowout with her mom. Today, she’s sympathetic toward her mother’s parenting approach: “She was a refugee — got married when she was like 12, gave birth when she was 13 or 14,” the singer says. As a teenager juggling three jobs, though, Alemeda “felt like my life was horrible,” which led her to start writing songs over beats she’d source from YouTube.
TDE’s co-president, Moosa Tiffith, came across one of her tracks during “a late-night deep dive on Instagram,” as he puts it. “Just from that, I saw a star.” The two began communicating via DM; Alemeda, who was working in maintenance for American Airlines, eventually offered to hop on a plane to perform for Tiffith.
“I was like, ‘You don’t even have to pay for my ticket,’” she recalls with a laugh. “He didn’t know I had flight benefits from my job. I was just trying to make it seem like I was real serious about it.”
Alemeda moved to L.A. in 2020 and immersed herself in music, honing her sound by writing dozens of songs and strengthening her voice in lessons with the vocal coach Willie Norwood (who’s also the father of Brandy). In 2021, her song “Gonna Bleach My Eyebrows” went viral on TikTok; she scored additional sort-of hits with “Post Nut Clarity” and “First Love Song.”
Because she’s working in a rock style, Alemeda says she’s had to seek out collaborators beyond TDE’s go-to writers and producers. “People here are used to going, ‘Here’s the beat list,’” she says of the label’s typical recording process. “For me, every session is a jam session — like in the movies where the kids are in the garage and the mom is like, ‘Kids, be quiet!’”
Among her studio partners on “But What the Hell Do I Know” are the producers Stint and Tyler Cole and the songwriter Salem Ilese, the last known for her early TikTok hit “Mad at Disney.”
Even so, “I’ve been called a rapper so many times” because she’s Black, Alemeda says. “I have no bars! It’s disrespectful to rappers to call me a rapper.” She laughs. “It literally makes me cringe — like, Oh my God, they’re doing it again.”
Alemeda and Chinouriri both say that SZA’s huge success with genre-blurring albums like “SOS” and “Lana” have opened doors for artists like them. Ditto Doechii, who “offers a different perspective of the weird Black girl,” Alemeda says.
“From what I’ve seen online — because I’m chronically online — people are tired of looking at the same thing over and over,” adds the singer, who will perform this weekend in L.A. at the Camp Flog Gnaw festival overseen by Tyler, the Creator. “They want to see different people doing different things.”
Where would Alemeda like to see herself a year or two from now?
“You’ve caught me in my seasonal depression era, so this probably sounds a little negative, but I think just better than where I am right now,” she says. “I don’t know if you’ve seen my TikTok, but I be promoting the f— out of myself.”
When she got in the game, she says, she was happy to feed the algorithm with memes, pranks, dances — whatever it took to attract somebody’s attention.
“I was like, I’m 20 — it’s OK to be corny,” she says. “But I did not expect to still be doing little dances online. I’m not above it. I’m just like, Nah, I can’t do that — I’m old now.”
This story originally appeared on LA Times
