Genia tried to make cool music in the past. Cool in the contemporary sense of I don’t need anybody, f*ck love, I’m good over here. But it wasn’t working. “I was making music with that subject,” she says, “and it just wasn’t correlating with who I am.” The problem was simple: Genia actually likes love. A lot. “I actually do care about love, and I am actually very intense with my love,” she says. “There’s no in between. I take my love to the max. It’s all or nothing.”
That realization became Intense Lover, a new EP from the Def Jam-signed singer that arrives at a moment when emotional detachment feels like a prerequisite for cool. Genia has chosen the opposite stance. She’s making records about wanting somebody, missing somebody, saying too much, feeling too much. The kind of stuff people are often encouraged to keep in journals. She put it on wax instead. “I know it may not be the most, like, cool thing to do,” she says. “But it’s the most honest thing for me.”
Honesty, as it turns out, has been pretty good for her. The song that unlocked the project, “Miss Your Touch,” wasn’t even supposed to be the beginning of anything. Genia made it on a random day last year, essentially as an emotional release, with no big strategy behind it. She sat on it for a few months, teased it, and watched it take off. Her reaction was less I knew it than Wait, what? “This is the most simple song that I’ve ever done,” she remembers thinking. The lyrics were, by her own description, “super mushy and gushy.” People loved it. That surprised her enough to change the plan. “Miss Your Touch” led to “Can’t Wait,” and the project began taking shape around the discovery that maybe the version of Genia she had been trying to suppress was the version people actually wanted.
The rest of Intense Lover expands the palette. The two released singles live comfortably in classic R&B territory, but the EP doesn’t stay there. “Oh Boy” and “No Rulesss” have the glossy, high-energy feel of 2000s radio, while “FuhYuh” digs into something more funky. Across the project, Genia moves through R&B and pop sounds without treating any lane like a permanent address. And she can actually SING over all of it. Genia isn’t interested in becoming an artist whose music works only until the lights come up. She wants the lights. She wants the stage. She wants the whole show.
“I want to be an entertainer,” she says. “I want people to come to my shows and feel like they were entertained the entire way through.” That doesn’t just mean choreography. Genia wants the moments between the choreography to matter too. She wants an audience to leave feeling like they watched a show, not simply a singer perform a collection of songs. “I’m also a creative director,” she says. “So when I make music I can see the show in my head.” The lights. The stage setting. The choreography. The budget, she knows, has some catching up to do. “It’s gonna get bigger for me to be able to do the things I wanna do.” That’s fine. She can see it already.
Her standard is Beyoncé, which you can hear in the powerful presence of Genia’s vocals and in her desire to be known as a performer. Genia grew up in Victorville, California, singing in church, and says she knew from an early age that music was what she wanted to do. By freshman year of high school, the thought had hardened into a plan: she was going to make it a career. Her musical education was partly church, partly the internet, partly obsessive fandom. She would watch Tina Turner performances “back to back” and study them. Prince sits at the top of her list of influences, followed by Beyoncé, Rihanna, Drake, Michael Jackson, Doja Cat, and SZA, among others. The common denominator isn’t necessarily sound. It’s presence. Genia doesn’t just want to make records. She wants to command a room.
That same instinct showed up in the way she approached getting discovered. Coming out of Victorville, she didn’t have a neatly mapped-out industry plan. She didn’t know which label or executive was supposed to change her life. She had a phone, TikTok, and a very specific goal:
“I need someone to find me. I don’t know who, I don’t know how, but I need someone to find me on the internet.”
So she posted. Every day. Covers, performances, whatever she could make happen with the resources she had. Eventually, a cover of Deborah Cox's "Nobody's Supposed To Be Here" went viral. Multiple people found her. It wasn’t the instantaneous fairy tale she had imagined, and she didn’t sign a deal the next morning. The people who found her came back around a year later, in some cases almost two years later. The delay gave her something she hadn’t expected: time to figure out what she wanted before she had to make a decision. Eventually, she signed with Def Jam at 20.
That was supposed to be the part where the story got easier. It didn’t. At 19, she thought she understood what “signing” meant. “I thought that as you sign, and then you just blow up.” A few years later, she’s a little less naive about the business.
Genia promotes her own music every day. She doesn’t have a social media manager. She pays for promotion herself much of the time. The major-label deal exists, but the fantasy that signing means “the machine” suddenly catapults your career to superstardom does not. “I promote my shit,” she says, then pauses to acknowledge the profanity. “Excuse my language. I promote my shit, like, every day, all day. It’s me on the phone.” That’s Genia in miniature: self-aware enough to know she just swore, but confident enough to mean it.
She’s similarly blunt about the economics of being signed. The advance is not an infinite pile of free money. A couple of years into a deal, some artists can find themselves “damn near independent.” And she wants people to know that. Recently, she posted about everything she’d been dealing with during the year, including losing her apartment. Someone commented on a post, ‘But she’s signed.’
“If only you knew,” Genia says.
She says all of this without sounding bitter or ungrateful. She says it like someone who has finally stopped confusing the appearance of success with the experience of it. “A lot of signed artists may not talk about it,” she says. But it’s a reality for many singers.
A similar lesson came from an unexpected place: Korea. Genia recently traveled through Japan and Korea and worked with K-pop star Mark Lee, exposing her to audiences and artists outside the American bubble. The experience reminded her that there is always another room somewhere, and another person who hasn’t heard the song yet. “There’s a whole other world out there of people that haven’t discovered you or your music,” she says. In an industry where artists are encouraged to release a song, promote it for a few days, and immediately move on, Genia wants to keep pushing. Every day. Until somebody finds it.
“When I put a record out, I gotta keep pushing it, and I gotta keep promoting it every single day, because you never know who’s out there to discover you and where they’re at.”
Which brings us back to Intense Lover. The EP is about being incapable of feeling halfway. But the more Genia talks, the clearer it becomes that the intensity isn’t limited to romance. She is intense about performing, about promotion, getting better, and making sure the music reaches whoever is supposed to hear it. She even has new music waiting after the EP, including a song she’s particularly excited about, but she’s resisting the temptation to force the next moment. She wants to see what happens with Intense Lover first—who finds it, who loves it without being told to, what grows naturally from there.
Intense Lover is a bold re-introduction to Genia as the vocally charged R&B/pop powerhouse she is—an artist who isn’t afraid to embrace vulnerability, desire and big emotions while bringing the kind of commanding presence that makes a star. She doesn’t know how to care just a little bit. So she cares a lot. She loves hard, performs hard, and promotes her music herself.
And that’s what turns good into greatness.
Sold me at California. Saved in my Playlist. Thanks for sharing.
Amazing interview