Ambré Has Arrived on Sacred Ground
Our Sacred Issue cover star Ambré has spent a decade becoming herself — on her own terms, at her own pace. Now with her debut album on the way, the New Orleans-born singer has truly arrived.
There’s a question that follows Ambré everywhere she goes, one she’s answered in interviews and probably in her own head more times than she can count: What kind of artist are you? R&B? Soul? Alternative? The label-seeking is understandable. She has a voice that could make you cry in a grocery store. She’s a Grammy Award-winning songwriter who co-wrote tracks on H.E.R.’s debut. She’s been on Roc Nation’s roster since 2019. By most conventional metrics, she fits neatly into a category. And yet…
“I’ve never been an R&B artist,” she says plainly, the kind of plainly that makes you realize she’s said this before and means it. “I have R&B songs. But you can listen to any of my projects and hear all types of sounds and genres.” She’s not being difficult; that’s an accurate statement.
Welcome To The 504
India Ambré Perkins grew up in New Orleans. She was born there, shaped there, and proud of it in a way that runs so deep it informs the titles of her projects.
When she talks about New Orleans now, she doesn’t settle on easy nostalgia. “It’s some stuff that I grew up knowing,” she says, “and then there’s stuff that I learned as an adult about New Orleans that I put into my music.” That distinction matters to her. The city isn’t a costume. It’s a continuous education, something she’s still unpacking, still discovering, still folding into the work.
“I’ve been focused on being intentional with my words and what I put out into the world — and being true to the way that I see myself, not how the world sees me.”
The Reluctant Musician
She didn’t plan any of this. That’s the part people might not expect from someone who has quietly become one of the more compelling voices in contemporary R&B. The sheer accidental-ness of it.
“I never really made a decision to do music,” she says. “People were just telling me I was good at it.” One of the biggest among them was her sister, who kept pushing her to record, to put things out, to let people hear what she was doing. Ambré didn’t even like her own voice for a long time. “I always loved music,” she adds, and you believe her. It’s just that loving music and deciding to stake your whole life on it are two different conversations, and for her, the second one happened gradually, almost by default.
She played trombone in the marching band. Sang in the school choir and at church, which, for many Black artists from the South, is where the voice gets its first dose of real training. She taught herself production and how to record. By the time she met producer Erick Bardales at 17 and started making actual songs, the foundation was well in place. She just didn’t know she’d been building it.
Her influences are the kind that tell you something real about a person. Brandy. André 3000. Frank Ocean. Prince. Stevie Wonder. Tame Impala. D’Angelo. The canonical and the niche, the feeling and the craft: it’s basically a blueprint for how she makes music today. She moves fluidly between worlds because she’s always lived in all of them at once.
The Journey to Now
Before the “blow-up," there was a writing camp. In 2014, producer Swagg R’celious found Ambré on Instagram after one of her early SoundCloud tracks started moving. He invited her to a session for a then-unknown artist named Gabriella Wilson, who the world would come to know as H.E.R. Ambré wrote two songs at that camp: “U” and “Changes.” Both made the album. That album won Best R&B Album at the 2019 Grammys.
Over the years, her pen would show up on Kehlani’s “Water” and “Honey”, Chlöe x Halle’s “Forgive Me,” and across a sprawling list of collaborators that reads like a who ’s-who of the last decade in R&B.
Pulp arrived in November 2019, the same week Roc Nation announced her signing. The EP was ten tracks of something genuinely hard to categorize: psychedelic, lush, emotionally direct, guitar-forward in a way that surprised people. Roc Nation co-president Omar Grant compared her to a modern-day Tracy Chapman. Ambré called it “a psychedelic coming of age story.”
Then came 3000° in 2022, and “I’m Baby.” The duet with Jvck James became the song her name travels with now. Confident, sensual, deceptively simple. The whole EP was a love letter to New Orleans, with her mother’s voice woven between tracks. 3000° was a direct nod to Lil Wayne and Juvenile’s classic Louisiana rap touchstones. “The name is a direct homage,” she told Rolling Stone at the time. That impulse, to honor where you come from while doing something entirely your own, is basically the throughline of her whole career.
Learning To Play
In 2025, Ambré joined Leon Thomas on The MUTT Tour, and she went to learn. Not just to perform or get her name on a bill, but to absorb something new. What she came back with was a deeper obsession with musicianship: the kind Prince had, the kind that makes an artist dangerous on stage because their relationship with their instrument goes all the way down.
“One thing I learned from Leon on tour was his musicality and stage presence,” she says, drawing a line between him and her love for Prince. “They both play almost every instrument. That’s something I’ve been wanting to experiment with and do more of myself. Leon is someone I’ve been friends with for years, so to see his journey is very inspiring. It felt like great practice for me every night. I was sharpening my skills.”
If you’ve ever seen her perform with a guitar, you know she doesn’t play around. At the Atlanta stop on the MUTT Tour, Ambre was up there making people in the front row fall in love. The guitar was part of it. The physicality of it, the way it turned performance into something lived-in and real. The instrument thing isn’t a gimmick. It’s a direction she’s been moving in for years now, and what’s coming next reflects that.
The word “genre” came up in our conversation, but only in the context of not being defined by it. “Black artists are constantly boxed into this R&B label,” she says. “If you sing, you’re just R&B.” She’s not mad about it, but she’s clear. “I’m not a person who likes to define myself by genre.”
“I don’t view genres as separate. I love R&B, I love funk, I love hip-hop, I love jazz, I love rock, and country. I just make music.”
She’s been making music that moves across sounds since Wanderlust in 2015. Her upcoming album, led by the single “She,” is a continuation of that refusal. And based on the album preview we’ve heard, it’s the fullest expression of it yet.
What Ambré Wants You to Feel
Ask her what she hopes people take from the era that’s coming, and she doesn’t give you a tidy answer. She gives you the full list.
“I want people to feel joy. I want people to feel sad. I want them to feel nostalgic. I want them to feel heard or seen. And I also want them to just feel whatever comes to their heart and be able to express that freely. I want them to feel completely engulfed in the world I created.”
A world she created. That framing is intentional. Ambré doesn’t talk about music like it’s a product. She talks about it like it’s a place you go…like somewhere that holds you. “I see entire images,” she’s said before. “It’s like a whole movie, and I see scenes. I’m a storyteller.”
The next chapter of that story draws from somewhere deep and specific: the spirituality of D’Angelo’s Voodoo, the way that record moved not just sonically but ceremonially. Like something you didn’t just hear, but also experienced. That energy is in the room when she talks about what’s coming. You can feel it without her having to name it.
The past few years have been a deliberate recalibration, a shift toward intention. “I’ve been focused on being intentional with my words and what I put out into the world,” she says, “and being true to the way that I see myself, not how the world sees me.” That’s the work underneath the work. The craft of it, sure, but also the harder project: learning to trust your own perception of yourself over everyone else’s.
It’s the kind of thing that sounds simple and takes years. But Ambré has put in her 10,000 hours.
When she introduced herself at the start of our conversation, there was something easeful to it. Unhurried. Like someone who has stopped needing to explain themselves and started just being themselves instead. Incredible new music (with some incredible features) is on the way. The vision is locked in. Whatever box you were about to put Ambré in before, leave it. She doesn’t need it.
Credits:
Writer + Exec Producer – Dante Nicholas
Photographer – Jhalin Knowles
Stylist – Paris Cole
Creative Director – Dante Nicholas + Jhalin Knowles
Video Director – Dale Roberson
Photo Assistant – Makayla Howard
Consultant – Cedes Sanders
Obsessed. 🥰
STUNNING VISUALS!!! Can’t wait to dive into the article but had to start off with that! CONGRATS YAMZ TEAM 🤎