Empire Child Leans Into Letting Go on “Cut The Ties”
London has a long tradition of producing artists whose real story plays out somewhere behind the lights, and Ruth Rothwell has spent years living exactly ther, working alongside Basement Jaxx and Zero 7 at MCA/Universal, helping shape records that became other people’s hits. With The Empire Child, her debut album under the name Empire Child, she steps out of that shadow and into the foreground.
“Cut The Ties,” the album’s focus track, distils the project’s emotional centre: a song about releasing the people, places and patterns that have stopped serving you. The theme lands with extra weight given the long, quiet apprenticeship that preceded it. The arrangement carries that lightness too, an unhurried jazz pulse, soft soul harmonies, and a barely-there reggae lilt that nods to Rothwell’s south London upbringing and her mixed Indo-Jamaican and South African heritage.
Empire Child as a whole sits at that same intersection. Jazz, soul and a hint of reggae are braided together, but never as self-conscious genre-collage; the album feels rooted, and it sounds like an artist who has been gathering material for years and finally has the room to put it out on her own terms. Identity, heritage and the slow art of letting go are the through-lines.
http://www.empirechild.com/
https://www.instagram.com/theempirechild/
https://www.tiktok.com/@empirechild
https://www.youtube.com/@empirechild
