Magic Woman – ESKA is ‘The Real Deal’

ESKA / Magic Woman / Music Eska Mtungwazi / Lyrics Eska Mtungwazi, Jesse Hackett / Production Eska Mtungwazi / Additional Production Aviram Barath / Vocals, Programming Eska Mtungwazi / Drums Alex Thomas / Bass Robin Mullarkey / Guitar Dave Okumu / Recording Engineer(s) Dilip Harris, Louis Hackett (Antonio Feola’s Fish Factory) / Mixing Engineer Nick Powell (Unit 9) / Mastering Engineer  Kelly Hibbert (Almachrome) 

With Magic Woman, the second single from her forthcoming album, ESKA doesn’t just defy artistic expectations—she obliterates them. Soul queen? Jazz siren? Rock goddess? She’s all of them and none of them. This comet won’t come around again! she declares, and she’s right. Artists like ESKA don’t repeat themselves. They blaze through, leaving us breathless in their wake.

More than a song, Magic Woman is an invocation—a battle cry for every woman underestimated, worshipped, or cast aside. ESKA isn’t just singing about the Magic Woman; she is the magic. Mother, daughter, sister, lover—she embodies them all, her voice painting stretching, snarling, crackling with fire as she shapeshifts from bluesy swagger to preacher’s wail before exploding into a feral Danger Mouth!

But Magic Woman is more than myth-making. It’s a song forged in resistance—art wrestled from the weight of motherhood, the cost of living in a gentrified London suburb, citizenship in a fractured nation, the white noise of a world on the brink; exhaustion thickens the air, yet even the smallest acts—a meal prepared, a child held, a song written—become triumphant acts of defiance. The everyday is sacred, and ESKA delivers it with the voice of a prophet.

Sonically, Magic Woman pulls like a tide, tension surging through bubbling verses before crashing into a sensual halftime chorus. From the opening line—Got to be around his secret, sacred woman, she can do so many things—ESKA grips you, blurring love and legend. The Magic Woman is a force of nature, carved from jet black, ebony tree with heavy roots, unshakable in her power.

Lyrically, it’s devotion (He’s gonna lie with his bones next to hers someday), defiance (I’m not gon’ stop, even when it’s all turned black), and self-possession (You had the heart of a magic woman). A hymn to survival. A testament to the radical, world-building magic of women who refuse to be contained.

ESKA is the real deal. And Magic Woman is her most powerful spell yet.