The first instruction is contained in the title.
Tega sikio means “listen” in Swahili. Not hear this. Not notice me. Listen: an active, generous act requiring attention from both the person speaking and the person receiving their words.
Across the five songs of Tega Sikio: Listen, Macharia asks for that attention quietly. There's no oversized introduction and no attempt to force significance upon the record. Instead, she makes space - for memory, distance, family, hurt and the complicated experience of building a life somewhere far from the place that first made you.
The Manchester-based Kenyan singer-songwriter describes each song as a letter: something either she needed to hear or wished she could say to somebody else. It's a beautifully simple premise, and one which gives this short debut EP an emotional coherence many much longer records fail to find.
In a little over 16 minutes, Macharia moves between generations and countries, intimacy and community, English and Swahili. But the music never feels like a calculated assembly of influences. Its identity is lived rather than advertised.
Opening track “Tega Sikio” begins the record not only as a song but as an invocation.
Macharia has said that she wrote it while imagining what her ancestors might say to her. The layered voices give that idea physical form: she may stand at the centre of the recording, but she doesn't sound alone.
It establishes one of the EP’s central concerns. How does an artist move forwards without severing herself from the people, stories and language behind her? What can be carried across continents - and what can only be recovered by listening?
Macharia’s voice is remarkably expressive, but she doesn't use it to overwhelm the material. Its strength lies in control: the small catches, held notes and changes of weight that allow a lyric to feel inhabited rather than simply performed.
There is warmth in that voice, although the record never mistakes warmth for uncomplicated happiness.
On “Stranger to Me”, the focus tightens. Its emotional world is one of recognition turned inside out: the disorientating discovery that somebody once intimately known has become unreachable.
The arrangement leaves room around Macharia rather than cushioning every silence. That restraint is fundamental. Estrangement is presented without theatrical recrimination; the song is wounded, but it's also watchful. Its composure makes it more affecting.
Macharia’s writing is direct throughout the EP. She doesn't bury feeling beneath elaborate abstraction or strain to produce a line designed for social media quotation. Her songs communicate because they hold on to the texture of things genuinely said - or perhaps the things rehearsed privately before they could ever be said aloud.
“You’ll See” begins the record’s gradual movement away from rupture.
Its title might sound confrontational in another setting, but here it carries reassurance: the voice of somebody trying to believe that the present moment won't last forever. That assurance remains fragile enough to feel earned.
This is where the letter form becomes especially useful. A letter can cross a distance that conversation cannot. It can address somebody absent, somebody lost, or a future version of ourselves who may understand what the person writing it cannot yet see.
At the EP’s launch in Manchester, Macharia invited audience members to write letters to their future selves. She is keeping them safe, ready to be returned next year. The exercise wasn't separate from the music; it expressed the same faith running through these songs - that words can wait for us, and that a message written from one difficult moment might just reach another version of a life.
Then comes “Moto”, and the record’s energy changes.
Moto means fire. The repeated Swahili refrain brings rhythmic lift and a more communal spirit, without breaking the intimacy established by the preceding songs. If the earlier tracks look backwards or across an emotional distance, “Moto” feels present-tense: alive to the body, to repetition and to the energy created when a voice is answered by other voices.
This is an important turn. Macharia’s relationship with her Kenyan identity isn't treated solely as heritage or longing. It's active, playful and capable of transformation. The record doesn't position Kenya as a fixed past and Manchester as an adopted future. Both are present in the artist now.
That refusal to package cultural identity neatly is among the EP’s quiet strengths.
The closing “Days Go By”, featuring guitarist Ben P Williams, is the record’s longest and most spacious song.
Williams’ guitar doesn't compete with Macharia’s vocal; it gives it somewhere to rest. Their musical conversation is patient, and the repeated acknowledgement that it's hard to watch the days pass carries both sadness and acceptance.
It would have been easy to finish this record with a grand statement of arrival. Macharia chooses something subtler. Time continues. People alter, leave or become distant. Home changes in our absence, and so do we.
Knowing that somebody is all right doesn't necessarily remove the pain of being apart from them.
That emotional duality - gratitude and grief, love and separation, pride and uncertainty - is where Tega Sikio feels most truthful. The record doesn't resolve every feeling it raises. Its letters are acts of connection, not final answers.
Macharia’s biography could easily encourage lazy descriptions: Kenyan-born, Manchester-based, bridging cultures. All of that is true, but it doesn't quite capture what is happening here.
A bridge connects two stable points. Tega Sikio is more interesting than that. It understands identity as movement: something continually revised by memory, migration, relationships and the stories we decide to carry.
This is a debut with no need to shout about its importance. Its confidence lies in its openness and its refusal to mistake volume for power.
Macharia asks us to listen. Those who do will find an artist learning how to speak across distance without diminishing any part of herself.
And, perhaps, inviting the rest of us to consider what we would say if we wrote honestly to the people we have been—and the people we still hope to become.
Release information
Tega Sikio: Listen was released on 29 July 2026.
