The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman by ESKA – Album Review
By Ellie Victor
It’s been a decade since ESKA Mtungwazi — mononymously ESKA — released her Mercury Prize-nominated debut, and in that time she hasn’t followed the music industry’s algorithmic churn. Instead, she’s been everywhere and nowhere at once: scoring theatre, collaborating with jazz astronauts and spoken-word prophets, co-writing for BBC dramas — even launching perfume into the astral plane alongside Esperanza Spalding.
Her new album, The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman, is the kind of release that feels beamed in from a parallel dimension — not a comeback, not a reinvention, but a continuation of something quietly radical. It is an album rooted in the mundane epics of post-everything Southeast London: early-morning writing sessions, motherhood, home-education, grief, spells, joy. The ordinary, as ESKA sees it, is just one veil away from the divine.
The result is a strange, stirring and beautifully untidy record. Imagine Laura Mvula if she loosened her corset and walked barefoot into the woods, or Erykah Badu broadcasting from a haunted greenhouse in Sydenham. There’s a cracked, incantatory quality to it — ESKA doesn’t so much sing as paint with her voice, layering and folding tones until meaning emerges from the mist.
ESKA Mtungwazi, 2025
image: Daniel Owusu
“Fiercly modern”
Take ‘Daddy Long Legs’ — a funk-infused breakup hymn co-written with Jesse Hackett that sounds like Prince’s Parade era took a wrong turn into free jazz. Over hypnotic synth loops and celestial harmonies (with Laura Groves swirling in and out like ghost vapour), ESKA chronicles the wreckage of a toxic relationship with lines like: “It felt so good you’d think it was love / it will never see you right.” The track’s alchemy is completed by Soweto Kinch’s smoky, sidelong saxophone — it doesn’t solo, it slinks.
Elsewhere, ‘Magic Woman’ barrels forward like Björk fronting a cosmic marching band, all mythic swagger and witchy electronics. There’s a sense throughout that ESKA is conjuring something ancient through something fiercely modern — her voice at once earthy and unplaceable. She doesn’t emulate Björk’s sound, but she does share her instinct to make music that refuses to resolve neatly, where the production is as much the message as the lyrics.
But if Björk brings the Icelandic volcano, ESKA brings the roots and soil. There’s a deep lineage here — of folk, funk, spiritual jazz, and diasporic storytelling. You hear echoes of Miles Davis not in the sonics per se (this isn’t Bitches Brew) but in the risk: the refusal to repeat oneself, the drive to sculpt time and space into something new. ESKA’s voice often takes on the role of Davis’s horn — lyrical one moment, abstract the next, always probing.
“Creative ambition”
‘Human’, with its glitchy electronics and wounded harmonies, captures the fragile strength of someone navigating the labyrinth of domestic life and creative ambition. It’s hard not to hear Badu in the way ESKA rides the silences — there’s a jazz of restraint at work, where spaces between phrases tell you as much as the notes themselves.
There are imperfections here, to be sure. Some tracks drift, a few ideas feel more like sketches than statements. But this is also part of the record’s charm: its refusal to smooth itself out, to become an “album” in the Spotify sense of the word. This is an artefact, not a product.
By releasing it physically first — I got the vinyl, tactile and tangible — ESKA is resisting the flattening of the listening experience. This is music you sit with, read liner notes to, maybe even light a candle for. Again, like Prince, she is building a world around her work, trusting the right ears will find it.
The Ordinary Life of a Magic Woman isn’t a grand statement in the traditional sense — it’s something stranger and more valuable: a spellbook disguised as a record, a transmission from a musician who’s decided that the real revolution is staying weird, staying true, and staying unbothered.
8/10
Ellie has spent over three decades dissecting riffs, rhythms, and rockstar egos, all in pursuit of the perfect review. Her music writing journey began at 12 with a glowing 10/10 diary entry for Echo and the Bunnymen, and she’s been chasing that high ever since. Armed with encyclopaedic knowledge and a soft spot for the sonically daring, Ellie will review anything that’s put in front of her – as long as it’s on vinyl.
