Renao - 'Break It Down
Renao releases new single ‘Break It Down’ before his upcoming London headline at Camden Assembly on March 7th where listeners can hear exclusive unreleased material.
This single which is accompanied by an evocative video is the first offering from Renao’s transformative new partnership with producer Zach Nahome who has previously produced great songs from PinkPantheress, Bakar and Slowthai. For Renao, 2023 will have larger body of work released which grapples with deeper questions of identity.
When the path for Renao diverged, he chose to leave behind his Olympic ambitions as a promising professional Badminton player in India to pursuing a career in music and heading to study in Leeds. With sport having a massive presence in both Renao’s homeland and his own family, this change of path this saw him in unfamiliar waters in the pursuit of notion that had lingered with him since childhood.
Originally intending to be a producer he decided to release his own vocals culminated in several early outputs including his late 2021 single, ‘Nobody’ which found early success in TikTok, and has now amassed millions of streams. Without turning his back on the significance of these earlier outputs, he is now able to reflect that his previous song writing had lacked personal depth because Renao was not ready yet to let down his guard, which after working with Zach Nahome it allowed Renao to slacken these bindings and therefore sets an effect of confidence that has allowed him to steer his own story.
On the origin of the single and video, Renao explains the whole song came out on the initial line, ‘She’s got me in a chokehold.’ With an intimate song, Renao wanted it to feel like him and the person he wrote this single about were the only two people left on the road driving home. Renao states that he visualises songs in his head before he puts the words down, and that the video is a true representation of what he was seeing. Producer Zach also gave him the confidence to embrace his falsetto and because of this it makes the song even more special for him
Words by Beth Simms
