Megiapa’s Everyday Afrofuturism

Some futures arrive in chrome. megiapa’s arrives in hand-built synth patches, voice notes, improvised grooves, family, doubt, patience and the decision to trust the strange little connections other people overlook.

Earth is the mothership

Intentions is the International Anthem debut of Ohio-born, Los Angeles-based producer, vocalist, visual artist and linguist megiapa. The record arrived September 25 after years connected to Chicago’s underground beat scene, where she developed alongside improvisers, producers and musicians who treated electronics less like polished machinery than something you could bend by hand. That history is audible. Intentions moves through R&B, jazz, funk, downbeat electronics and psychedelic beat music, but the point is not to win a genre-counting contest. The music feels tactile. Loops wobble. Voices arrive like internal notes. Instruments do not simply decorate the production; they interrupt it, answer it and sometimes take over. Pitchfork’s review connected the album’s cosmic imagery to a more grounded strain of Afrofuturism: not escape to a fantasy elsewhere, but freedom imagined from where Black people already are. That distinction fits megiapa. Her future is not a spaceship leaving Earth. Earth is the difficult, beautiful mothership.

PULL QUOTE: megiapa’s future is not chrome. It is handmade.

The bedroom producer becomes a bandleader

The album credits reveal how much of the architecture remains hers. megiapa produced tracks 2 through 14, handled vocals throughout, and recorded the project between Chicago and Los Angeles, with additional musicians adding bass, drums, flute, percussion, trumpet, keys, EVI and vocals. The collaborators include Mekala Session, Aisha Mars, ghalani of Greenwood, Ahmad Muhammad, Will Miller and others. That shift matters. Independent electronic music often celebrates self-sufficiency so aggressively that collaboration can feel like surrender. On Intentions, collaboration becomes evidence of confidence. The producer knows when to fill the room and when to leave space. International Anthem’s notes describe the project as a record shaped across years of upheaval, heartbreak and relocation. Its construction is slow enough to challenge one of the digital era’s worst habits: confusing constant output with artistic development.

Afrofuturism that remembers the grocery store

What makes megiapa interesting for G.U.M.M. is the refusal to separate big Black-future imagination from ordinary life. There are cosmic gestures here, but also relationships, uncertainty, protest, patience and the slow work of returning to yourself. The artist’s official Linktree goes one step further: alongside listening and purchasing links, it includes mutual-aid resources and a directory supporting displaced Black families. That placement is not proof that an album solves social problems. It is more useful than that. It shows an artist treating audience attention as something that can be redirected. That belongs in a Thanksgiving issue. Giving back does not always arrive as a charity gala. Sometimes it is a link in the place where the audience is already looking.

Please dream with uncertainty

Intentions ultimately asks for something algorithms dislike: patience. Sit with the record. Let the songs reveal themselves. Let uncertainty exist without immediately turning it into content. The future, megiapa suggests, might not be about predicting what happens next. It might be about becoming trustworthy enough to meet it.

Resources

• International Anthem — Intentions announcement
• International Anthem Bandcamp — Intentions
• Pitchfork — Intentions review
• megiapa official Linktree