“Attached” is putting it softly. As we sit in a stairwell of the concert venue, he’s decked out in his trademark distinction of purple. His corded pants and jacket, the shirt underneath, all mauve. Even his hair is dyed the same soft floral shade. A cursory scroll of his Instagram reveals that this is a near-daily commitment. He says the attachment with purple was born out of an early obsession with the colour’s mutable power. “When trying to figure out what I wanted my artist name to be, I didn’t just want a name, I wanted something that was actually me,” says Laryea, with hands folded over his knees (you can guess the colour of his nail polish). “I felt like it’s the hardest colour to define, you know? It’s a bit blue, a bit purple, it’s a bit grey, it’s a bit silver, it’s a bit pink. It’s a bit of so many things.” 

Similarly, Mauvey’s music blurs the lines between alt-pop and hip-hop. There’s a bit of drill, elements of soul, and a bit of hyperpop. “It’s a bit Mauvey.” Laryea was born in Accra, Ghana, where he lived until he relocated to Brixton, a suburb of London when he was four years old. The South London heritage is still evident in his accented speaking voice. While in high school, a basketball exchange program brought him to Agassiz, BC, a small community just outside of Vancouver. Mauvey says it feels like he grew up there as well, and he would return for the occasional holiday. The globetrotting continued, with Mauvey playing basketball in Kentucky, and across Europe. But amid his athletic success, tragedy struck.

“I didn’t just want a name, I wanted something that was actually me.”

Mauvey was in Denmark on Skype, congratulating a friend in America who was drafted into the NBA’s development league. “We were just chatting and then he was like, ‘Yo, I’ll be back.’ And he never came back.” His friend was killed in a hit-and-run that night. The tragedy dislodged his entire sense of self. “It was such a crazy, tragic event,” Laryea says. “I looked at my life in a really different way. I was like ‘what do I actually need to do with my life, what is my purpose with the time that I’ve got?’ I love basketball, but it’s not that.” 

The loss sent him reeling, and back home to England. He channeled his pent up emotions into a new outlet: writing. “For like a year and a half I just wrote. I didn’t know it was music at this point.” He tumbled through formats: poetry, short stories, and essays. Eventually the poems morphed into spoken word, and then into his early raps, but there was one problem. “I didn’t know how to do music. I was not trained at all,” Laryea recalls. So he attended open mics, learning the contours of his own voice as he went along, and drawing from the storytelling aspects from the folk, country and soul he grew up with. A new sense of self began to emerge.

“Mauvey came out of the confusion because I never settled on ‘I’m going to be a pop artist.’” Despite this, Laryea developed his singing voice, found a way to rap in his own way, and even embarked on a DIY international tour in 2015. “We did like 20 festivals that summer. I sold out my first hometown show of like 700 people.” What was more gratifying — and draining — was the fact that he basically sold every ticket himself. “I researched the venues, who had played there recently, I connected the support acts myself,” says Laryea, rambling off the list of duties that go into a tour, often facets that concertgoers don’t see. “That’s what it was like, I auditioned a new band in every single city. In-country transport, flights, everything. It was in 2015, for nine months, but that’s where I got the confidence to perform live.”