Silk is, of course, a luxury fabric, one that projects both comfort and sophistication, but for Abuja-hailing singer-songwriter ru., and her SILK EP, it goes deeper. “I chose that name ’cause I feel like it’s such a paradox,” she tells Apple Music’s Africa Now Radio. “It’s soft when you touch it. It looks glistening and shiny. But spider silk rivals the strength of steel. So, [the fact] that I’m ‘soft’ or that I’m presenting as a fragile babe, or [that] I’m a woman or embracing my softness does not mean I’m lacking strength.” Across the five songs on the EP, ru. quantifies what it’s like to be a woman in a way she hopes will leave the sisterhood of her fanbase feeling that much better about their own journeys. “It’s literally a collage of different frames of me being a woman,” the singer says. “It’s my diary, but it’s also my message, daring women to just accept who they are. So, there’s songs where I’m singing in third person, ’cause I’m looking at the woman I’m aspiring to be. There’s songs where I’m talking to myself. There’s songs where I’m singing from who I am now. It’s a compendium of many things.” “Throw it on the floor, show me how you do scatter,” she sings on “Entertainer”. Here, dancing becomes both seduction and proof of self-possession, as one body commands the floor while another’s attentive desire gives meaning to the display. The song is carried by a softened four-note piano ostinato and buoyed by distant, treated vocal fragments. “Girly Girl” is a double-perspective character portrait that celebrates a woman who commands desire while exposing how male fascination curdles into moral judgment. It’s about “a good-looking woman on a normal day,” ru. says. “How people perceive you and also what you are.” Viscous piano chords and shakers introduce “Colours”, a meditation on self-affirmation and extroverted expression. “‘Colours’ dares people to actually own everything that they are,” she says. “All shapes, all colours, all forms. Colours, literally, but also metaphorically because—especially being a creative—you can dance and sing and [do] so many things, and people just want you to find a lane, but I don’t think everybody’s supposed to have just one thing. We’re complex, and it’s OK to be.”