Soul Pop from Kimaya Diggs

A fourth-generation artist based in Western Massachusetts, Kimaya Diggs has built a musical world where indie soul, jazz, R&B and folk coalesce. Kimaya grew up singing with her sisters before developing a genre-fluid sound of her own and alongside her work as a singer-songwriter, she’s also a writer, poet and producer, talents that have increasingly become intrinsically linked to the music she creates.

Her latest chapter is arriving with her upcoming album Green, which finds all of those instincts converging around questions of belonging, goodness, love and the landscapes that shape us. The record features musicians from Nashville and Western Massachusetts, including harpist Lizzie No, Dr. Dog drummer Eric Slick and Chicago-based artist Sen Morimoto, while its production remains deeply connected to the sphere of soul and R&B.

The album begins with an image that feels almost deceptively simple, the colour green, which immediately brings to mind the backyard of her Western Massachusetts home, where woods open onto a farm and layers of trees, native plants, birds and insects create a living landscape. When she moved there, invasive plants had crowded the land and she spent years working to bring the environment back into balance and that slow process of restoration became a metaphor for her own growth.

Green captures the strange sensation of waiting for change for what feels like an eternity, only for transformation to suddenly become visible. Kimaya connects that moment to her own personal development, describing growth that seemed to take a long time before arriving all at once. That sense of arrival comes after a period marked by grief and caregiving; her 2023 album Quincy was closely tied to loss and the experiences that reshaped her life, while the 2024 singles “I’m Sad Again” and “Everything Is Not Lost” continued that emotional context.

Green begins somewhere else by framing questions about belonging and how can values be reflected in life. Those questions give the album its emotional architecture, with Kimaya’s songwriting acting as both portal and roadmap towards a future self, imagining a world and way of being that’s not yet fully taken shape. On her brand new single titled “Plants (Still Grow),” that exploration becomes tethered to the New England summer surrounding her home, capturing the intimacy of a season already beginning to turn into memory, bringing together relationships, place, desire and the communities that can make outsiders feel less alone.

The natural world and human connection become intertwined, with belonging existing somewhere between knowing the land and choosing the people with whom to build a life. Set up by the gentle patter of percussion and intricate blend of warm bass notes and flickering acoustic guitar tones, Kimaya’s alluring voice enters to stitch delicate melodies into the breezy musical fabric with soulful delivery. Gliding with laid back drums, mellow backing vocal lines and the steady rhythm of the arrangement, Kimaya’s stunning voice dances above to craft an enchanting slice of folk-tinged soul pop music that’s mesmeric, memorable and meaningful all at once.

With lilting rhythmic sway, superb instrumental flourishes and enticing vocal performance, “Plants (Still Grow)” sees Kimaya Diggs serve up a magical musical moment that’s truly impossible not to love. Having recently played alongside artists including Mavis Staples, Emily King, Trombone Shorty and Tank & the Bangas, Kimaya Diggs arrives at Green with a clearer sense of her voice and vision and we can’t wait to see what it entails.

Listen to Plants (Still Grow) below

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