Uwineza’s ‘Wings’ teaches you how to sit still again

Some sounds or music moments force one into a type of submission on the heart and the consciousness understands. 

The moment you are sent a song or an album to review, you sort of want to listen to it on your feet, standing, waiting for it to literally rock your world, even when they promise that it will slow it down. It is rare. 

We live in a time of immediacy, of music engineered for virality and volume, for the quick hit rather than the long exhale. So when something arrives quietly, almost apologetically, asking not for your attention but for your surrender, you have to stop and listen differently.

However, Zoya Uwineza Mothupi-Sarges, better known as Uwineza and her upcoming nine-track album titled Wings offer just that. It does not demand to be played loudly. It does not beg to be understood immediately. Instead, it sits with you, waits for you to arrive and only then begins to speak.

Wings is a quiet work that requires reflection and surrender, which in all honesty most of us need in this new year. It is the kind of album that meets you where you are emotionally but also gently nudges you toward where you might need to be. There is no rush here, no urgency to impress. Just honesty, space and a willingness to sit in discomfort until it becomes something else. 

The album, set for release in April, follows her debut album titled You’re Gonna Hate It, which was released in 2025. Where that first body of work felt like an introduction — guarded, slightly ironic, testing the waters — Wings feels like a deep breath taken once the door has been closed and the noise has been shut out. It is not a response to anything external. It is an inward conversation.

This new body of work offers stillness, much like how the album was made, in the Greek Islands. Stillness not as emptiness but as presence. As awareness. As the act of staying long enough in one place for thoughts to catch up with the body. You can hear it in the pacing of the songs, in the restraint of the arrangements, in the way silence is allowed to exist alongside sound.

We catch up with Uwineza, who is enjoying some safari, to tell us about this stillness right before the beginning of the rat race. There is something fitting about that — speaking about quiet, about reflection, while the world waits impatiently for you to re-enter it.

“We’re not bored often enough anymore. So I guess that stillness was being in one spot. It was a great position to be in. To be at a beach in one spot and under the sun and contemplating or actually just listening to your inner voice.”

“So I think that, stillness, ironically means that. There’s a lot of unrest going on mentally, in the quiet. I feel like nowadays we have so many distractions that help us to not have to listen to that inner voice. But the longer you don’t just succumb to that stillness, the harder it becomes to achieve it after a while,” she shares with us in a video meeting under a thatched roof building.

Stillness is evident in the three songs that we got a chance to listen to. You can almost hear the space she was in when compiling the work. The air. The light. The unhurried passing of time. I have never been to Greece before but I was whisked away when I heard the composition of the sound in the songs. There is something transportive about them, not in an escapist sense but in the way they allow you to imagine yourself somewhere quieter, somewhere less cluttered.

One would think that the sole purpose of her student exchange to Greece was for her to pull together a body of work that sounds like that. But no — it was all organic and meant to be all at the same time. Life happening alongside art, rather than art being forced out of life.

“The album was really all for my own documentation purposes and succumbing to that stillness. It’s about a lot of insecurities that I think come up a lot when you’re traveling or when you’re just in a new environment or a new phase of life happens,” she says.

There is something deeply human about that admission. Travel, often romanticised as freedom, can also amplify doubt. New environments strip away familiarity, leaving you face to face with yourself. Wings feels like a diary written during those moments — not polished for public consumption but honest enough that others might recognise themselves in it.

“Those songs were written at a time where it was kind of like the last resort, in a way — to try and get that relief. And now looking back at them they definitely represent or symbolise confidence, enlightenment or peace in a way. But at that moment of time each song or each moment was like a small exhale for the feeling that was inside,” she shares.

That idea of the song as an exhale is important. These are not songs written with certainty. They are songs written to survive the moment. To release something before it becomes too heavy. And perhaps that is why, in retrospect, they carry peace — because peace is often what remains once you have allowed yourself to feel fully.

Uwineza says that she wasn’t trying to sound a specific way. It was really all up to the guitar, writing and singing and adding a few elements post-production.

“It’s really supposed to be as stripped down as possible. So I think that everything’s really just supposed to represent or symbolise being naked, almost like succumbing to nothingness and then seeing what comes out of that,” she says.

There is bravery in that kind of bareness. In a world obsessed with layering and masking, choosing to strip things back is a radical act. Wings does not hide behind production tricks. It trusts the song, the voice, the silence in between.

In Wings, she works closely with producer and long-time collaborator Nikolai Looft. Uwineza says they collaborated way more on this project than they did on the previous one.

“For the last project I had way more finished songs that I brought to him and he did his magic on the production of it. This time it’s just been a mix of both of us putting input in the writing, in the guitar parts and I have one or two songs that I wrote completely on my own. He has one or two songs that he wrote that he wrote on his own that I’m singing on,” she says.

“So I think it’s very cool that we … had the intention of just capturing the moment of Greece together instead of bringing older songs and trying to create the storyline out of that instead.”

That intention – to capture a moment rather than manufacture a narrative – is what gives the album its coherence. It feels lived in, rather than assembled.

Greece was absolutely captured in the songs, which is why there was a keen interest in pinning down what the visuals for such an offering would look like. “I love butterflies. I have, like, a butterfly tramp stamp. I’m obsessed with wings and the whole concept of the caterpillar going in its cocoon and then getting wings.

“I’m seeing the blues a lot. Not because it is very moody in that sense but more like a bright blue sky and the ocean. So I’m going to say nature and wings.”

“While you’re listening to the album, imagine the sun hitting your face and you’re hearing the ocean and the wind hitting your skin and there’s a breeze,” she hopes.

The takeaway is simple for Uwineza but simplicity does not mean shallow. “That you can resonate with it and read between the lines and find your own rhythm within your own answers to your problems. Everyone asks everyone for advice sometimes and obviously you have one or two people who you really trust but at the end of the day you know your truth, the truth that you feel complete and content and happy with,” she says.

“Trust yourself. Even though the answer isn’t easy, just to trust yourself that … like in those silent moments, you can unlock your intuition.”

Wings is not here to tell you what to feel. It is here to sit with you while you figure it out. And sometimes, that is the most generous offering of all.