Poppy Ajudha knows who she is, and she knows what she wants. “I’ve always been very forthright, very opinionated, very stubborn,” she affirms confidently. “I think anybody would say that about me.” This resolve to remain wholly true to herself is reflected in her new-found sonic clarity, one shown in impressive transparency on her recent releases. Ajudha is personable and alluring, the type of person whose vitality raises your own expectation of self. I meet her in Kings Cross on a sticky hot late morning in mid June, and share an hour with her that plays out more like a therapy session or a late night afters chat than it does an interview with any degree of structure. Born-and-raised in New Cross, well-nestled in London’s south east, the singer-songwriter has, over the last half decade or so, become a staple of London’s musical epicentre; a breath of fresh air amongst congestion, a skip in the city’s ceaseless heartbeat.

Ajudha garnered mass attention for her intimate strand of jazz-tinged, soulful R&B, bolstered by collaborations with UK scene savants like Tom Misch and Kojey Radical. Her 2018 EPs — “FEMME” and “Patience” — rooted her in the capital’s zeitgeist, rising in coalescence with a bountiful cohort of similarly sonically inclined artists, swiftly becoming apexian to the scene. From there, she shared her debut album, THE POWER IN US, in 2022, a boldly socio-political theme-driven record that tackles a diversity of themes from identity to abortion rights.

The Poppy in front of me, though, is a very different artist. She’s hardly a newcomer, given her years of experience and multitude of projects, yet she returns to the fray this summer with the effervescence of an emerging star, armoured with rigid assurance and a barely recognisable sonic posterior. “Currently I’m free-falling,” she jokes with smiling eyes. “I’m in that middle bit where I’m trying to get people to readjust to this new sound and style. There’s a lot of things that are new and I feel like at the moment I’m climbing the hill-slash-falling off the cliff… I’m not sure which one yet.”

The sound in question, as exhibited by the three singles Ajudha has unveiled so far this year (“My Future”, “Ready” and “Girl Next Door”), is unashamedly pop-orientated. That’s not to say that her approach of the past didn’t obtain mainstream appeal, but her current run of music feels designed, almost destined for commercial success. The shift’s inception came from Ajudha feeling unfulfilled by the musical processes that she’d become accustomed to. She sought for collaborators further afield, brazenly stepping into the unknown.

From zoom lockdown writing sessions to a trip to the celebrity capital, Ajudha was enticed by the charm and opportunity of LA, working with esteemed American producers like Wes Singerman and Tyler Blake Dexter, who boasts Kendrick Lamar and Kehlani amongst his collaborators. “I convinced myself that there weren’t people in London that I could write with that understood my music,” Ajudha admits. “There’s certain British influences that came through in the [previous] music. But I listen to a lot of American music and I wanted those soul, R&B and hip-hop pop influences to come through more. I found when I worked with US producers they just got it and when we would work together there was a better synergy.”

“Girl Next Door”, her third and most recent cut of the year, is a turning point in Ajudha’s songwriting, delving into her sexuality, hopes and dreams, and also her sonic output, unafraid to fully explore her pop sensibilities for the first time. “It was a pivotal moment, I just didn’t realise it at the time,” she says about the rousing, upbeat number, the birth of “a new music direction,” that was released at July’s climax. “It was a big part of my sonic transition into a more pop-leaning sound. I was listening to a lot of alt pop stuff, Kevin Abstract, King Princess. It was [written during] my first proper queer relationship and I was reckoning with my sexuality in a very real way, and I started writing this song that felt very different to me. It’s about falling in love with my neighbour, but also this development of wanting to go to LA and write songs but not really knowing how I was going to get there. It’s a love song but also about leaving home in search of something bigger and better.”

Ajudha’s trip across the Atlantic, and her fearlessness to reinvent herself sonically, has resulted in a soon-coming full-length body of work unlike anything she’s made before, one which she “can’t wait for it to be out”. Where her first album from 2022 was instinctual, this follow-up is measured, considered. “My first album was very free-flowing and more experimental and open,” she pinpoints. “This project was much more intentional, I really wanted to write melodies that felt catchy and to challenge my songwriting. With the production too, I developed the songs more and if it wasn’t right, I would reproduce it four times, which I never did on my last project. I’m quite precious about my art, so [before this album] I wanted to release everything I wrote, and it all felt like my most important piece of work. But on this project, I wrote a lot more and then chose really carefully what made sense for this record and how it reflected who I am as an artist and as a person. The album is self-titled and I wanted it to feel like it was about my journey, growing up and coming to terms with myself and my interpersonal relationships.”

Currently, Ajudha is building up to the release of this forthcoming project, which is set to be graced upon us sometime later this year. It’s clear she is happy with the music, but as someone who thinks social media “makes everybody so vacuous and superficial and interested in the things that don’t really matter in life,” the rigamarole behind the actual music creation can understandably taint her drive and vision. “Sometimes 10 people have a fucking opinion,” she exclaims. “It’s very emotionally draining — finding the balance between being a creative person and being a business person. Because as an independent artist, I don’t have someone else running my business, I have to do all of it and I have to know what I want. And that can be really hard because that’s not what I signed up for. I signed up to be a creative, emotional artist that writes songs. But, you know, things don’t always go hand in hand. I think that’s what I loved about going to LA, I would just be writing. You feel away from everything and no one’s going to ask you to do anything. I could just focus on creating music. Now I’m in the space of promoting it, it’s much more about all of the business side which I think is important to be able to do because otherwise someone else does it for you and they’ll do it in a way you don’t like.”

Nevertheless, Ajudha remains firmly planted on her goals of realising whole-hearted self-expression and making a profound impact through her music. With her sonic evolution and more condescended ethos set to root her ever deeper in mainstream conversations, Poppy Ajudha will, as she always has done, tackle what’s in front of her with a smile on her face. “If I’m met with something that challenges me, I have to do it,” she tells me as we finish up our side-bar and head back into life’s endless party. “It’s something that’s really important to me from a moralistic perspective, like I hate people that lie and I hate people that are cowards, I think that those are the worst characteristics. If you can’t face who you are then you’re a fucking wet wipe. If I’m met with something that’s scary or if I’m met with something that makes me feel like I’m not good enough, I have to rise to it. I’d rather fail than never try.”