23-year-old Jamaican born, London raised artist Denai Moore announces her highly anticipated sophomore album We Used To Bloom.  Produced by Steph Marziano, the album will be released via Because Music on 16th June. Following the recent release of second single Does It Get Easier? an elegant blend of toughness and soulfulness, Denai unveils the accompanying video, directed by In Bloom’s woman of the moment Mahaneela. Watch Does It Get Easier? premiering now on The Fader.

Speaking about the video and collaboration, Denai says: "The core of this album has really had a strong female energy. Girlhood is important to both Mahaneela and I, and we have such strong Mothers in our lives. By shooting portraits of different family relationships in juxtaposition to my own, we portrayed how much of a similar experience we are all having. Does Is Get Easier? is about how beautiful it is that we go through good and bad times in life. There will always be a sense of not knowing at whatever point you are, and that's ok !"

Mahaneela adds: “For me, the Does It Get Easier? video represents not just a collaboration between Denai and I, but also the growth of our friendship into what it is now. I wanted to create something that was authentically her. Family is important to both of us and no matter who you are or what you’re going through, that kind of uplifting love you give/receive from those closest to you is what will ultimately get you through the tougher times when you doubt yourself.”

The last couple of years have provided an intense and sometimes painful period of growth for Moore — an experience that she documents now with unflinching openness on We Used to Bloom. These 10 songs reveal a young woman figuring out the world and her place in it, while also charting Moore’s evolving relationship with herself — with self-esteem, self-image and the crippling anxiety she once suffered and is now challenging head on through her songwriting.

What is particularly notable about Moore’s music — in her early EPs and collaborations, on Elsewhere, and now in We Used to Bloom - is how it defies genre. There are R’n’B influences, certainly, but alongside them stand a love for folk and soul, for Bon Iver, Feist and Solange, for Sufjan Stevens’s The Age of Adz into the “richness” of Beyonce’s Lemonade, for the fact that “Kanye never made the same record twice”, for the way that St Vincent “really reinvented the idea of being a lead guitarist.” And there too is the girl who learned to play keys alongside her session musician father, the girl who took up guitar and sang at a young age, who spent her childhood in Jamaica listening to the gospel music of the local churches. “And melodically that still influences me,” she says. “It’s a very resonant music. It stays.” And so to bracket Moore with any one particular scene seems naive —such defiance of genre is crucial for a flourishing British music community.

The new albums title, she says, is a nod to the feeling of self-growth. “I chose it because I felt like I’m in the growing aspect of my life,” she explains. “There’s something about blossoming and blooming that I associate with being younger, but now I’m older and I’m really coming to understand myself as a person. We used to bloom; now we grow.”