Amahla Gets Stuck in the Feeling on “Sticky”
Updated: Sep 18
Salsa, jazz scatting and questionable romantic decisions all find their way into Amahla’s playful new single “Sticky”.
Amahla’s “Sticky” is for anyone who has ever known they should leave someone alone and then immediately ignored their own advice.
Produced by WAVSDNTDIE, the song came together while Amahla was preparing for an intensive salsa course. It sounds like an oddly specific detail until you hear her explain it. Latin dance had become somewhere she felt completely free, and when WAVSDNTDIE played her the first idea for “Sticky”, she felt that same connection straight away.
“Sticky is the first song WAVSDNTDIE and I wrote together. We met just as I was preparing to do an intensive dance course in salsa. A few years ago I discovered that latin dance is where my body feels free. When WAVSDNTDIE played me his idea, unknowingly he’d been building this world that I already loved.”
The bassline was apparently enough to win her over. The lyrics were slightly less cooperative.
“As soon as I heard the bassline, I knew it was iconic. For the first time I could feel how the instruments connected to my body. I must have written ten different versions trying to make my lyrics feel as effortless as the instrumentation. I wanted every line to feel irresistible.”
Ten versions later, irresistible feels like exactly the right target.
“Sticky” lives in that messy space between knowing a relationship probably isn’t good for you and still finding yourself pulled straight back towards it. Your head has made a perfectly sensible decision. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to tell the rest of you.
That push and pull could easily have become something overly serious, but there is a playfulness running through the track instead. Part of that comes from Amahla’s relationship with jazz, particularly the way she uses scatting as inspiration for her melodies.
“My melodies are inspired by jazz scatting, so they’re playful too, just like the spirit of the song.”
Jazz sits alongside reggae, soul, Caribbean and Black British music in Amahla’s wider musical background, but “Sticky” doesn’t feel interested in showing off a list of influences. They simply turn up in the way she moves through the song.
The track also arrives with a visualiser directed by Owen R Barbet, featuring Amahla performing the song in a more intimate setting.
Maybe that is what makes “Sticky” work so well as an idea. It takes something that could be exhausting — wanting somebody you probably shouldn’t — and lets it be fun for three minutes instead.
Sometimes you make the sensible decision. Sometimes you hear the bassline.
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