megiapa // Intentions

On Intentions, Los Angeles-based producer, vocalist, and composer megiapa turns five years of upheaval and self-reckoning into a debut that feels both intimate and cosmic. Built from ideas dating back to 2020 and shaped between Chicago and Los Angeles, the album moves through warm synths, soft-focus basslines, clipped drum programming, voice notes, and live improvisation with an ease that keeps its spiritual language from becoming weightless. The opening “Open Your Eyes,” produced by 10.4 ROG, establishes the record’s central balance: bright, inviting surfaces carrying an inward-looking message. From there, megiapa lets jazz, soul, electronic R&B, and beat music overlap without forcing them into clean categories. “Can’t Believe” is among the album’s most affecting turns, with Will Miller’s EVI, trumpet, and piano deepening a song about romantic disillusionment without crowding its vulnerability, while “Crashing Down” pushes uncertainty toward something closer to release. The two “spaceway” pieces make the Sun Ra connection explicit, but the album’s Afrofuturist current is less about homage than permission: an imagined space for pleasure, expansiveness, and possibility. Elsewhere, interpretations of The Blackbyrds’ “Dreaming About You” and Rotary Connection’s “Black Gold of the Sun” fold older soul vocabularies into megiapa’s own hazy, handmade world. Contributions from Ahmad Muhammad, Mekala Session, Telemakus, Aisha Mars, Blvck Spvde, and others widen the palette without disturbing the album’s sense of authorship. Intentions is patient, searching music, and its strongest moments arrive when healing is treated not as resolution, but as an ongoing creative practice.