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Greentea Peng

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South London singer Aria Wells, whose smoke-hazed take on soul leans on dub weight and a voice that slides around the beat rather than sitting on it.

Aria Wells was born in Bermondsey, south London, in 1994, the daughter of an Arab father, a trained actor, and an African mother. Her father introduced her to theatre and taught her songs, and she sang in school and church choirs as a child, groundwork for the voice she later used as Greentea Peng.

At twelve, after her parents separated, she moved with her mother to Hastings rather than attend secondary school in London. Bullying pushed her away from music by the time she was fifteen, and after passing her GCSEs early she dropped out. She returned to London at seventeen, working bars in Dalston while struggling with drug addiction.

A period of travel through California, Peru and Mexico followed, paid for with bartending money. Her stage name came from a box of Green Tea Seng bought at a Peruvian chemist, combined with the London slang word "peng." Time spent working at a yoga retreat in Tulum helped restore the confidence to write and perform again.

Back in London, she began working with producer Earbuds on her debut EP, Sensi, largely written around a breakup, and re-emerged in the late 2010s with EPs and singles blending neo-soul and R&B with reggae and dub bass weight, psychedelic textures and jazz-inflected arrangements. Her vocals carry an unhurried, behind-the-beat phrasing and rasp, delivered with a live band built on organic instrumentation, in lyrics that move between the personal, the spiritual and the political.

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