Genie Santiago shatters negative cycles with soft strength on ‘Inner Space’

On the cover of her album Inner Home, Genie Santiago clutches a bouquet of sunflowers as she levitates over the earth. Beneath her, additional sunflowers sprout, stretching their stalks to the sky. She gravitates in course of the heavens, caught in an unbothered limbo, attainable meditating.

Each component matches collectively to sort Santiago’s private utterly happy place — a sacred psychological home she surrendered to the world upon the discharge of Inner Home. The soulful Boston singer dropped her debut full-length doc remaining month (October 27), sharing a progressive snapshot of her spirituality and socio-political activism.

Followers of Santiago are already acquainted collectively along with her battle cries for equality, equal to her 2020 single “Revelación“. Inner Home branches out from these rebellious seeds, as Santiago waters her visions with the tears of yesteryear to create a additional fruitful future for not solely herself, nonetheless totally different girls, people of shade, and queer individuals. Inner Home crushes cycles of abuse, prejudice, sexual assault, and trauma beneath its heel in most likely essentially the most peaceful methodology potential — with poetic endurance and love.

Nonetheless Santiago’s perspective wasn’t moreover so peachy.

“I was an offended teen and it merely acquired worse into maturity,” Santiago tells Vanyaland. “All of it stemmed from the abuse, trauma, and neglect I regularly suffered as a toddler. I’d often get bodily if I felt threatened by one other individual. I was toxic in relationships and friendships. Any time I was triggered I’d lash out in an unhealthy and damaging methodology. Not solely was I being damaging to others, my actions had been ultimately hurting me.”

“Generational curses / My mother’s psychological neurosis / My father’s heroin doses / Foster homes after which homeless,” Santiago divulges on “Kindled Costumes,” recalling her earliest reminiscences. She pauses sooner than she drops one different bombshell: “Monsters are precise / He bought right here every night merely to fill me with fear.”

As quickly as Santiago delves into her earlier, she amicably detaches from it, working in course of wellness alongside a stacked deck of supportive Boston experience. Forté, ALGO, Jazzmyn RED, Anaís Azul, and Nora Borealis each lend their voice to Inner Home, whereas Mertz spells out Santiago’s story by the use of his updated trend of R&B manufacturing.

“I lastly sought help and started getting involved with my Indigenous ancestors,” Santiago says of her path to therapeutic. “I was fortunate to hunt out an amazing counselor who is usually a POC, intuitive, healer, and trauma survivor. With arduous work and loads of triggering moments, I was able to nurture my infant self who suffered an extreme quantity of. I like little Genie. No person is worth her hurting anymore.”

Inner Home isn’t the beginning of Santiago’s journey in course of a extra wholesome life, neither is it the highest. As an alternative, the album frames Santiago in most likely essentially the most extremely efficient place of all: In movement, blooming similar to the blanket of sunflowers gracing the cover paintings.

“My ancestors, my mom and father, and the earth have all suffered adequate. I would like to interrupt the cycle,” she concludes. “Ample people in my life precipitated ache, and I didn’t have to be one in every of many of us hurting me [anymore].”  

Enter Santiago’s Inner Home beneath.