Leigh-Anne Pinnock is feeling the pressure right now. The former Little Mix member is sitting with her hands clutched in an all black lace-and-leather look inside a meeting room at Vogue House, ready to reveal all about her very first solo project “Don’t Say Love”. “Everyone’s so excited to see what we’re going to do, what sound…” she says. “What if I disappoint?”
The 31-year-old does have quite the legacy to follow up. Until 2022, she was one quarter of Little Mix: the X Factor-winning girl band that achieved five Number 1 singles and a Number 1 album and finished their run with a history-making win as the first female band to win a Brit Award for Best Group.
“We smashed it as a band. We did so blooming well,” the High Wycombe-born, Surrey-residing star, and now mother to twins says of that time. Now, though, it’s all about her. Working on her first solo album in her Jamaican home was “such a liberating feeling because you don’t have to compromise.” In a group, there’s a lot of that. Not every song suits every voice, plus “all of us have to agree on what we were saying,” she explains. “Now it’s so amazing for us, because we can literally just say whatever we want straight from the heart.”
For Pinnock that means opening up about the tough side of being in a band: the comparisons, particularly as the only Black member of the group. As she discusses in her documentary, Leigh-Anne: Race, Pop & Power, “I was living in a very white world for most of my career,” she says.
“The pop industry is very white, we did have a predominately white fan base. It took me so long to understand why I was feeling so undervalued. I just blamed myself. My family would be like, ‘Oh, Leigh, you’re getting the same money. It’s fine.’ I just couldn’t accept that.” A tour stop in Brazil, where Black fans told her how big an impact she had had on them, changed her life. “Fans were chanting my name – I’ve never had a response like that and we’d been in the group for nine years,” she says.
This new record – which mixes R&B, amapiano, garage, and afrobeats into pop – gets into rediscovering her confidence, solo. One song, “I Did That”, reflects on her accomplishments. “I had these incredible girls around me, holding me and even though sometimes they might not have understood, they still had me,” she says, her voice wobbling as she tears up. “Oh, here she goes again getting upset, I knew it was going to happen!” The album will also discuss the trials and tribulation of motherhood and her relationship with Andre Gray. “Things aren’t perfect, and I get a bit deep with that.” But, building this family has grounded her. “It puts it all into perspective and changes you. Things don’t phase me as much, in a good way,” she smiles. “Now I feel so resilient.”
