Japanese-British producer, DJ, songwriter and multi-disciplinary artist Maya Jane Coles returns with new single ‘Rise Up’, a collaborative release featuring Baltimore rapper Rye Rye, out today 5th June via Maya’s Night Creatures imprint.
Built around submerged bass pressure, tightly coiled percussion and Rye Rye’s razor-sharp vocal delivery, ‘Rise Up’ taps into Maya’s long-standing love of hip-hop while continuing to define the wider world of Night Creatures – sitting somewhere between club music, rap, visual art and experimental songwriting. The release also marks the first in a wider run of forthcoming material from the imprint, signaling a broader creative direction for the label.
Speaking on the single, Maya explains: “I had made the instrumental of ‘Rise Up’ quite a while back, and whenever I was playing it out, I’d drop a Missy Elliott acapella over the top. The crowd would always go nuts for it, and I knew I had to get a sick female rapper on the track. I’d always been a fan of Rye Rye’s work, and I could instantly hear her doing something special over it. Rye Rye is one of those artists whose vocals have been sampled repeatedly in electronic music without credit. It felt way more exciting to collaborate than sample, so I hit her up to see if she’d be down to work on something together. She said yes, and the rest is history.”
Rye Rye adds: “I love this record, and I resonate with it personally. I needed a little motivation and wrote this record to remind me of who I am and how fierce us women can be, even going through tough things. It’s like a girl anthem giving women some fuel to the fire!!! The production is phenomenal and so uplifting that it goes hand in hand!”
While firmly built for the club, ‘Rise Up’ also taps into a wider conversation around influence, authorship and crossover within electronic music. Maya’s decision to collaborate directly with Rye Rye, rather than simply rework or reference her vocals, feels significant within a dance landscape where Black female vocalists have so often been sampled, repurposed and detached from their original creative context.
The release also lands around 15 years on from ‘What They Say’ – the truly era-defining breakthrough anthem that launched Maya from underground producer to one of the most respected and singular artists in electronic music. Across the years since, she has consistently operated outside convention, moving fluidly between underground club music, hip-hop, pop, visual art and experimental songwriting while remaining entirely on her own path.
True to that wider creative vision, ‘Rise Up’ arrives alongside artwork and visuals created in collaboration with Japanese artist Saki Tomita, whose surreal, dreamlike aesthetic mirrors the strange beauty and nocturnal energy of the Night Creatures universe. The release forms part of a broader expansion of the label’s visual identity, as Maya continues building an immersive creative world spanning music, illustration, design and storytelling.