EP Spotlight: Homegrown by VanJess
On Homegrown, VanJess address situationships, dysfunction, and desire without melodrama. The EP sounds like the work of artists who no longer need to prove anything to anyone watching.
Sisters Ivana and Jessica Nwokike spent nearly a decade learning what most artists never bother to teach themselves. They started in 2009, recording covers in a pink-walled bathroom in La Palma, California, beatboxing their way through Mariah Carey and Lady Gaga, stacking harmonies by ear while accumulating tens of millions of YouTube views. That apprenticeship demanded discipline without any promise of professional return, and it forced the siblings to refine their blend before anyone offered them studio time or a publishing deal. When they signed with Keep Cool/RCA in 2017 and released Silk Canvas a year later, the record signaled competence rather than potential. Homegrown dispenses with signaling altogether.
The Nwokikes grew up splitting years between Lagos and Southern California, absorbing both Fela-adjacent party music and MTV rotation R&B from SWV and Jodeci, and their Nigerian-American duality registers here as sensibility rather than strategy. They pronounce Yoruba and Igbo phrases without glossing them; they slip into pidgin English when the mood tilts familiar. The decision requires no curatorial framing because it predates any marketing consideration. VanJess had spent quarantine constructing a home studio and returning to the amateur rituals that shaped their technique, and that process clarified something the duo already suspected about themselves. Their sound had grown incrementally, not because they chased reinvention but because they repeated their methods long enough for subtleties to accumulate. The record documents the difference between artists who declare maturity and artists who simply begin behaving like adults, and the distinction matters more than any genre classification or critical positioning could.
The EP opens with percussion and bass that invite physical response before any vocal line clarifies intention, and that sequence matters. “Come Over” positions desire as immediate and uncomplicated, a late-night appeal delivered without hedging. Jessica and Ivana harmonize around direct language about wanting to be present in someone’s space, about skipping the preliminary courtship and arriving. The track’s disco inflections recall Chic without quoting them, and producer M-Phazes builds a groove that prioritizes warmth over slickness. When the Nwokikes reconfigure the same material as “Come Over Again” at the album’s close, sampling Faith Evans’ 1995 Bad Boy single of the same name, they slow the tempo and strip the arrangement to something more patient. The shift registers not as conclusion but as duration, as if the relationship depicted across the nine songs has accumulated enough trust to permit a different pace.
Between those bookends, VanJess address the specific textures of contemporary romantic entanglement with precision that avoids both complaint and celebration. “Boo Thang,” featuring Devin Morrison, tracks the ambiguity of a situationship, observing how affection accrues without formal recognition. On “Dysfunctional,” KAYTRANADA provides a bass pattern that buzzes and stutters while Ivana and Jessica admit to staying in something flawed because the pull remains stronger than the logic. The admission arrives without melodrama or self-flagellation. “Caught Up,” built with Phony Ppl, borrows funk accents and pleads for rescue from a drowning that sounds more habitual than catastrophic. Throughout, the duo maintain the octave-doubled harmonies that have marked their output since those bathroom recordings, a vocal signature that persists regardless of producer or tempo. On “High & Dry,” sparse trap percussion punctures an otherwise stripped arrangement, and their voices fill the negative space without rushing to occupy every silence. The EP ends where it began, circling back to the same appeal, slower now but still reaching toward the same body in the same room.
We still miss them together.
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