NME’s latest star of The Cover, Ena Mori, has compiled an exclusive playlist to accompany the story’s launch – check it out below.
The rising singer-songwriter is on this week’s (September 29) edition of The Cover, a weekly manifestation of NME’s commitment to supporting emerging talent across the globe on a weekly basis. Every week, a rising artist will feature on The Cover – you can read the profile of Ena Mori Dawson here, written by Khyne Palumar and featuring photography by Ennuh Tiu.
To accompany The Cover, Ena Mori has curated the exclusive ‘Get Into The Zone’ playlist tracks. The collection features a varied range of music and artists, one that reflects her maximalist pop sound, and includes songs by Björk, FKA twigs, Kate Bush and the Cocteau Twins, among others. Listen to the full playlist on Spotify below and on Apple Music.
In this week’s The Cover, Mori, who grew up in Japan to a Filipino mum and Japanese dad, speaks about how she clung to pop songs for comfort when school bullies picked on her for being mixed-race. “Making music for me is honestly a self-love activity,” she says, and she sought to recreate that feeling of safety and sticking up for herself on her debut album, 2022’s ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’.
However, Mori also admits thinking that “probably only a really niche group would dig my music. I didn’t expect so many people to resonate with it and I wasn’t looking to get acclaim – but support from these prestigious places and from fans has been such a boost of motivation and made me feel like I could keep on this path.”
Right now, Mori is riding the high of her twin EPs’ slow rollout: starting with the recently released ‘rOe’, and concluding next year with ‘ORE’. A play on hard and soft, the EPs’ themes of yearning for innocence and wide-eyed wonder can be traced back to Mori’s childhood – a throughline in her songwriting. But unlike “the louder the better approach” of ‘Don’t Blame The Wild One!’, ‘rOe’ is “more an internal monologue than an outward statement” of not quite wanting to grow up yet.
Find out more about Ena Mori in the full Cover story here and see who else has been on The Cover here.