I built a playlist a few months back that I told myself was just songs I was into at the time. Forty-seven tracks. I know the count because I sat on my bedroom floor at midnight tallying them up with my phone in hand and fighting the urge to text someone I’d been lying to myself about for weeks. Every song traced back to one feeling – that physical inconvenient pull of wanting someone so badly it starts reorganizing your life around them before you’ve made any conscious decision to let it. The hunger kind of wanting. The kind that shows up at 7am on a fucking Tuesday while you’re in the shower and your mind goes somewhere it shouldn’t and your hand follows. You know what I mean. Once you’ve felt that about someone, there’s no clean way to explain it to anyone who hasn’t. Kulud felt it. She brought Keisha in, put it on a record, and called it ‘Motivation,’ and the song is what wanting sounds like when you’ve finally stopped pretending you’re not.
She opens with a promise delivered so slowly you feel it before you understand it. “Everyday won’t be the same / and would you trust me when I say / One day it will all fall in place / and you will get used to me / you will see that I’m used to being / everything imperfect not so perfect” – “you will get used to me” is doing more work than it has any right to. Patient and possessive, it reads like she’s already decided how this ends and she’s just giving him time to arrive at the same conclusion. “Everything imperfect not so perfect” is the full, unguarded admission that she’s a mess, delivered in this low, buttery register that makes honesty sound damn near irresistible. The production underneath is liquid and unhurried, Motown-tinged in the best way, the sonic equivalent of bare feet on warm hardwood at midnight.
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Then she moves into a section I find genuinely impossible to argue with. “pour me up a glass of wine / sneakers, jeans or suit and tie / It don’t matter how I vibe / all i ever do is make you smile” – that’s the ease of a woman who has no performance left in her and doesn’t need one. She shows up however she shows up, and the outcome is always the same, and she knows it. That absolute, quiet confidence is hotter than anything flashy she could have written here. The groove underneath has this slow Friday-night pull to it, the tempo of having nowhere to be and someone whose mouth you want on you before the wine is even finished.
Where this track really gets its hands on you is the chorus. “I like the way you say my name / you make it seem so pretty / You make it hard to be the one that seems to give up easy / Your my Motivation” – the way someone groans your name when they’re deep inside you is one of the most specific intimacies in existence, and Kulud leads with it like she knows full well what she’s doing. She’s not talking about a greeting. She means that moment when a name in his mouth becomes charged and private in a way that belongs to just the two of them. And “you make it hard to be the one that seems to give up easy” – she’s confessing she’s already fully gone for him, that she’d stay well past the point where any self-respecting woman would walk out, and she owns that with zero embarrassment. She cannot fucking leave and this chorus makes that feel like the best decision anyone has ever made.
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In the second verse, she goes from devoted to territorial as hell. “It don’t matter your my love and in me I want you to trust / Most girls they don’t care that much / I want you to be the one / because your my only one / and I just can’t see myself without you (oooh oooh)” – “most girls they don’t care that much” comes with this gorgeous, earned arrogance. She cares this much, she’s saying so, and she wants his ass to understand the full weight of it. Keisha’s presence across the track adds warmth that makes the whole thing feel wrapped around you in a way that a solo vocal doesn’t always reach and that shit matters. That “oooh oooh” at the end of the verse sounds like the exhale you make when you finally get what your body was asking for. I’ll leave that right there.
Kulud is a South African singer-songwriter doing exactly what she wants in R&B, and the music is better for it. She’s built her catalog on soulful vocals and lyrics that go deep into love, desire, and the kind of self-discovery that happens when you stop apologizing for what you feel, with tracks like “Be My Queen,” “Missing You,” and “Still Luv U” already earning her a reputation as one of the more interesting voices coming out of South Africa’s contemporary R&B scene. Her sound has this quality where it feels both classic and completely current, the kind of shit that plays at 2am when you’re not trying to think too hard and also very much are. ‘Motivation’ is exactly what you’d expect from two artists who know how to make a moment feel inevitable.
That playlist is still on my phone. I stopped adding songs after this one because it said everything I’d been circling for months and couldn’t figure out how to say myself. I texted him at 1am last Saturday. Obviously I texted him. Kulud and Keisha made the case so cleanly I didn’t have a reason not to.
