act right

Album ∙ R&B/Soul ∙ 2025

Sasha Keable

It’s not uncommon for artists to find catharsis, resolution, and therapy in making music. For Sasha Keable, though, it was therapy that led her to songwriting. “I put myself into therapy when I was six years old,” the Londoner tells Apple Music’s Nadeska Alexis. “If my therapist didn’t hand me a book and go, ‘You need to start writing,’ there would be no Sasha [the artist]. She was like, ‘Start writing.’ I was so angry. I would just poke holes in the pages, trying to stab the book, whatever. So dark. Then after a while, the stabbing turned into kind of drawings. Then the drawings turned into words, then poems, then it started to turn into songs. And that was literally how my brain then started working through stuff.”

Given that songwriting foundation, it’s not surprising that Keable’s fifth EP, act right, is a work of bold honesty and expression. It’s also one where she can feel she’s making the music she wants to make, in the way she wants to make it—which hasn’t always been the case. The R&B singer-songwriter’s deep and nimble vocals first drew attention with her featured spot on Disclosure’s 2013 club cut “Voices,” but she’s dismissive of her debut EP Black Book, released the same year, and its 2014 follow-up Lemongrass and Limeleaves. “They’re not bad,” she says. “It feels like 20 million years ago. It just feels like it was so much of other people trying to dictate how I made music all the time. That was something that really didn’t resonate with me.” Two more EPs followed—Man in 2019 and 2021’s Intermission in 2021—but, again, Keable found herself yearning for more independence and she cut loose from her label and the teams around her. “Just after Intermission, I literally left everyone.” she says. “I was like, ‘No, I’m not doing this. I need to just set my own pace and work out what it means.’”

What it means on act right, her first EP in four years, is turning a betrayal suffered into seven heart-grabbing songs. Lean, efficient production allows the impact of her words to simmer in the spaces as she portrays a journey from devastation to healing. On “FEEL SOMETHING,” she’s helpless and reckless in the aftershock (“Feels like I’m driving 95 with no lights on/No seatbelt on a terminated licence”) and struggling to let go of a bad thing during the angry and fragile “heartbeat”—but the tears clear on the title track, leaving the bitter clarity of seeing someone for who they really are. Optimism floods through “WHY” as Keable manifests what love should be, creating a standard to hold future relationships to. Like the whole EP, it’s a work of purpose and belief, the sound of an artist expressing her truest self—and feeling satisfied with who that person is. “My main thing is being able to create music for myself, music that fuels me, music that keeps me excited, music that gets me up in the morning,” she says. “I was not going through a good time writing [act right]. I guess [it’s] music that literally made me feel like, ‘All right, you are enough.’”