THE CHIEF
STORYTELLER
BECOMES
THE STORY.
Nubia Yasin spent years writing, directing and framing the world around her. Now the person behind the story is stepping into the center of it.
WRITTEN FROM INSIDE UNAPOLOGETIC.
For years, Nubia Yasin helped other people understand what they were looking at. She wrote, directed, framed and interpreted. Somewhere along the way, the person behind the story became impossible to keep outside the frame.
That does not mean Nubia has suddenly become visible. She has been making work in Memphis for years through poetry, photography, installation, film, performance and music. The shift is subtler and more important. The artist who once stood beside the frame, deciding what belonged inside it, is increasingly willing to let the frame hold her.
From where we sit as her label, this is not a reinvention. It is a convergence. Every discipline Nubia has practiced is gathering in the same room, speaking in the same voice and moving toward Slightly Sacred, her forthcoming debut album with UNAPOLOGETIC.
01 / BEFORE THE RECORD
SHE WAS ALREADY BUILDING A LANGUAGE.
In 2018, Little Women transformed a Crosstown Arts screening room into a photography and installation based work with six poems inspired by Nubia’s childhood as a first generation Somali American woman. The project examined the stories imposed on Black girls, the regulation of Black women’s sexuality and the silence passed between generations. Its living room setting placed the argument where the harm often begins: at home.
The subject was already there. Nubia was investigating shame before it became a recurring word in descriptions of her work. She was interested in what forces a person to become smaller, what families hide to survive and what happens when private wounds are given public language.
By 2022, that language had become The Blood and Body, her first full poetry collection, published by HomieHousePress. A year later, SHEENA carried the inquiry onto the stage at the Green Room at Crosstown Arts. Original poetry and music traced the transition from girlhood to womanhood against what the official description called deep rooted shame.
The production did not promise to erase the darkness. It proposed something more human: look directly at it and refuse to hate what lives there.
A LINE THAT EXPLAINS THE MOVEMENT
“I just know what I want to say, and I want to say it louder than I ever have before.”
NUBIA YASIN, SPEAKING TO CHOOSE901 IN 2025
02 / THE MACHINE MOVES
UNAPOLOGETIC. DID NOT GIVE HER A VOICE.
She arrived with one. Our responsibility was to stop asking it to fit inside only one kind of room.
Nubia’s path into UNAPOLOGETIC. began with a year working as assistant to IMAKEMADBEATS. She had been accustomed to making work alone or with very small teams. SHEENA showed her what could happen when an entire creative machine moved toward one artist’s idea: musicians, designers, producers and people willing to help without first being convinced that the vision deserved help.
We believe labels are most useful when they do not mistake control for development. Nubia did not need someone to manufacture a musical identity for her. She needed enough room to test identities until the false ones fell away.
Nubia officially became an UNAPOLOGETIC. artist in 2023, though her relationship with the collective began earlier. The album that would become Slightly Sacred began taking its present form in 2024. Genres were tried. Arrangements changed. Songs had to prove that they could carry the story rather than merely decorate it.
The point was never to decide what kind of singer Nubia should be. The point was to discover what sounded true when she sang.
NOT A REINVENTION.
AN ARRIVAL.
03 / SLIGHTLY SACRED
THE SUBJECT IS POWER.
The ten songs of Slightly Sacred form what Nubia has described publicly as a complete sentence about power: its abuse, its gendered restrictions, the moments when she has held it and the possibility of surrendering to something greater than it. The album begins in confinement and keeps changing the meaning of freedom as it moves.
Her references tell part of the story. Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse sit at the roots. Mitski, Bright Eyes and Geese belong to the contemporary constellation. But the record is not an imitation of any of them.
Nubia begins with rough versions built in GarageBand, pairing collected lines with musical ideas. Then the songs enter OUTERSPACE. and become communal.
The circle includes Adam Billings on electric guitar; Aaron James on acoustic and electric guitar; Eillo across guitar, bass, drums and background vocals; Uni’Q providing background vocals and vocal production; ADUBB on trumpet; and IMAKEMADBEATS co-producing with Nubia. Her solitary practice is still audible. It simply has more bodies around it now.
WHAT WE SAW
A poet did not abandon poetry to become a singer. A filmmaker did not abandon images. A director did not stop arranging bodies, tension and silence.
All of those practices entered the music. That is why this moment feels less like a debut than a reveal.
Nubia’s work has always understood that becoming visible is not automatically the same as becoming free. A person can be watched and still be misunderstood. She can be heard and still be translated into something easier for other people to consume.
So the milestone is not simply that Nubia is singing now. It is that the music lets her remain complicated while she does it: Somali American and Southern, tender and severe, reverent and suspicious, funny and wounded, frightened and moving anyway. The record does not resolve those contradictions. It gives them rhythm.
04 / NOW LOOK AGAIN
THE STORYTELLER WAS NEVER MISSING.
She was inside every decision: the room, the image, the line break and the pause before the note. What has changed is our proximity. Nubia Yasin is no longer only teaching us how to look. She is allowing us to watch her become.
That is the story we can tell from inside the label. Not that we discovered Nubia. Not that we gave her permission. We witnessed an artist refuse the pressure to arrive before the work was true, and we built beside her while the separate pieces became one language.
THE CHIEF STORYTELLER HAS BECOME THE STORY.
SHE WAS WRITING IT THE WHOLE TIME.
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
Memphis Flyer: Nubia Yasin Steps Up to Power
Choose901: Leaning Into the Strange, Speaking Louder Than Ever