Megiapa Was Never the Feature

Some producers build a track and then go looking for a voice. Megiapa started from the other end: she was the voice, stitching samples together in Audacity and singing over her own beats long before anyone handed her a mic. A linguist by training and a beatmaker by obsession, she spent years in one of the most storied beat scenes in America. Her debut album on International Anthem, Intentions, is what those years sound like when it finally gets a proper frame.

The scene matters here. Chicago’s underground beat culture, the Push Beats, Open Beats and Fresh Roasted nights, built its reputation on communal experimentation: producers passing the aux, singers treated as guests. Megiapa was one of the few women on that scene, and one of the only beatmakers who sang over her own beats. That second fact is the whole story in miniature. She never waited for an invitation to the centre of the track. She was already standing there.

The label fit is exact. International Anthem has spent a decade documenting Chicago’s jazz and beat continuum as living culture rather than nostalgia, and Intentions moves across jazz, soul, funk and hip-hop the same way. It’s part mixtape, part jam session, and that’s no hedge. Play the record and it reads as precision: the sequencing thinks like a mixtape, the playing breathes like a session, and her voice runs through all of it as the one constant.

The lead single is “Open Your Eyes,” but the boldest move on the record is her take on Charles Stepney and Richard Rudolph’s “Black Gold of the Sun,” sung with Aankha Neal. Taking on Stepney is not a small claim; his arrangements are sacred text in Chicago. Her version treats the song the way the whole album treats the tradition she came up in: as something alive that she has earned a place inside, not a museum piece to admire from a distance.

She opened for Makaya McCraven and Ben LaMar Gay before moving to Los Angeles, two names that map the exact territory Intentions occupies, and she has since come home for a Chicago release show at The Land School, presented by International Anthem and Qobuz. What comes next is the interesting part. International Anthem debuts tend to be beginnings rather than summits, and Megiapa arrives with years of craft, a voice that was never a feature, and a linguist’s ear for how rhythm and language lean on each other. The beat scene kept her underground for years. Intentions sounds like an artist who used every one of them.