Dawn Richard has always been the quiet one. “I live through the art, and then I’m gone,” she tells PAPER. Even when the New Orleans native was in Danity Kane, she maintained this ninja-like quality: as the only alto voice in the group, Richard quite literally served as the melodic backbone.

Looking back, it’s clear that there was always something special about Richard. When Danity Kane was formed in 2005, she was 18 years old, and Hurricane Katrina had just ravaged her hometown and displaced her entire family. You can feel that pain when her voice pops up in that early Danity Kane music, a soulful-sad-sexy juxtaposition to the soprano voices that reigned supreme in the rest of the group and early-2000s female pop at large. Richard was the heart of Danity Kane; the name of the group actually came from an anime character Richard had come up with in high school (Diddy originally wanted to name the group Queen 5).

Her chameleon-like tastemaker essence shone through even then. Ultimately, Diddy disbanded Danity Kane but kept Richard and formed Diddy – Dirty Money in 2009. When that trio disbanded in 2012, Richard embarked on her own as a fully independent solo artist, exploring sound and experimental art in a way that felt authentically her — see New Breed or Second Line, or even her work doing animation for Adult Swim.

Then, she met Spencer Zahn. The multi-instrumentalist and composer first collaborated with Richard on 2022’s Pigments, a revelatory moment for both artists that became critically acclaimed. Now, they’ve done it again with their new record, Quiet in a World Full of Noise. Out October 4, the album encapsulates a healing process for both musicians in many ways. In hindsight, the name “Dirty Money” ended up holding some ironic truth. With the recent allegations coming out about Diddy and Richard coming forward about the rapper’s decades-long abuse toward her, Quiet feels like an important and cathartic moment for her.

Whereas Pigments was musically ambient in a more jazzy, percussive way, Quiet takes after its name by being more melancholy. With a simplistic piano as the core for many of its tracks, Richard goes full diary mode, laying bare her trauma over love, family and loss within 38 minutes. She tells PAPER of the heartache that she felt when Zahn came to her with these tracks after her parents were both struggling with cancer and her cousin was brutally murdered. Holed up in New Orleans with no outlet for her feelings, this album became therapy for Richard, a healing process in every sense of the word.

Below, Richard gets candid about her life, the making of Quiet in a World Full of Noise and why there’s always hope in the end.

What space were you in when Spencer came to you with these tracks?

I knew I wanted to continue on the saga of electro revival and what King Creole was. I was very much in my electronic headspace figuring out how I wanted the story to unfold. I was working with animation and visuals and how I wanted to continue that story. But life was life-ing as well. So I was doing a lot of stuff with home. My cousin was murdered. There were just a lot of severe issues, just like how all of this is happening right now, there was a lot of chaos within the creation [of this record]. Me and Spencer had done Pigments during COVID. He was in New York, and I was in New Orleans. I got stuck in New Orleans, and my mom had had a hip replacement, so I was with her in that process while I was recording Pigments. So we were very detached, but he and I knew we were onto something because we had done “Cyanotype,” which was the first record we had done together. That was just a single song. That was one of my favorite records that I had done.

I knew I wanted to get into composition. I knew I wanted to get into scoring, but I didn’t necessarily know if that would be my trajectory right now. I thought that’d be something that would come later, when I had been done with a lot of the dancing and the touring on the electronic side of things. The more I got into my animation and film side of things in the next five or six years, I was going to really look into scoring. But for whatever reason, the universe put Spencer into my life through Kimbra. That’s how I met him. He played piano for my show as I opened up for Kimbra. When we were going on tour together, we developed a very good friendship, and “Cyanotype” was so profound for me that I was like, I think we should work together again. COVID happened, and he had all these projects. He was like, ‘Let’s see if we can build something.’ That became Pigments, and it was beautifully organic in the sense that I didn’t think it would be an album. It was just healing. I was alone in New Orleans. This music was beautiful, and it turned out to be a body of work that I could turn into a film that I did, a dance film that I did in collaboration with NOCCA in New Orleans. I told this contemporary story of New Orleans in a really great way. We had no clue the reception would be so acclaimed. We had no clue that it would be my highest critically acclaimed album. And it showed a new light to where I was already going. I couldn’t turn away from it, because I was proud of it. I saw a new world for myself that I knew I could create, but not so soon. And I am never scared. I just put the electro revival on hold and started on this journey. I’m never afraid to do those things. I know most labels would be like, ‘No, stay on brand.’ But I never was that, never cared for that. I went where I felt like it was good to go.

The same thing happened with Quiet. Life was so aggressive that, as Spencer sent me these records again, we weren’t looking for an album. He said, “I have this body of work.” He sent me a 17 minute piece of work and said, “These are sounds I’m working with. What do you think?” I sent him back all of it written. And it was everything, the honesty of it, it was brutal. And as I got out of it, Spencer was like, “Dawn, I think we’ve got another one.” He was so taken aback by the honesty that he was like, “Are you sure you want to? You know this is really vulnerable.” I didn’t even know if I wanted the world to see me this way. I mean, I’ve always told my story lyrically. I think if anybody listened to all my albums, they’d hear the trauma. But it’s always metaphorical. It’s never this honest. So I had to make a choice. I thought, Who would I be if I didn’t release it? So that’s what became of it. And now here we are again with a project that I didn’t think I would do this soon, but quite possibly could be the best writing I’ve ever done.

If there was one word to describe this record, I think it would be “healing.” Pigments was more vibrant and colorful. That record almost sounded like you were climbing up a mountain, whereas Quiet sounds like you’re falling down a mountain.

Yeah.

I know you can’t talk about everything going on right now, but the album does feel like a sort of release. In “Breath Out,” you end by singing, “It’s curtain call/ You can breathe out/ You made it out.” And your voice shines on this record in a way that it’s never been depicted before. How do you think your relationship with your voice has changed through the years as an independent artist, but especially making this record?

Great question, and I’m glad that you find it healing. The way the album is named is exactly what it sounds like. It is exactly that: the quiet. But this one was interesting for me because my vocals have always been an instrument. I’ve always tried to use it in many different ways. Some people don’t always get it because people like to peg me as an alternative R&B artist. And so R&B passionate people tend to be like, “Why do you do so much on your vocal? I want to hear the runs.” And I did that. That was a part of my early life with Danity Kane and Dirty Money. I did that. I was singing balls to the wall there, right? Then on a lot of my electronic projects, I’d love to use my vocals as instruments where there are counter melodies, and sometimes I’ve got auto tune and vocal processors on it, because I want those things to be that for the story. And I enjoy that. So I never really cared if people felt like there was too much going on. That was a part of the story of my music. When you listen to people like SOPHIE or Bjork or Twigs or Grimes, these artists who play with that, that’s the part of the oil, right? Artists that utilize their voices in really interesting ways. I am a part of that world.

This album doesn’t sit like that. We do not use any processing. I don’t do a lot of runs. It isn’t about how many runs or how soulful I could be. This was truly led by lyrics. In a lot of cases, it was more difficult to hold back and that was the choice. There will be nothing on this vocal. This is not about showing people how well I can sing. This is what pain can be, and it’s almost uncomfortable to be this honest. So what does that sound like when you are so raw that you can’t think about the delivery? You’re thinking about the story, and that’s what this is. “The Dancer” is about as vocal as I get, where it comes to a moment of runs and technical choices, of the way in which I approach the record more soulfully. But even in that song, there’s a lot of holding back. And that’s the truth, because no one wants to be voicefully telling their trauma, right? There is a fear in the way in which you choose to say the truths and hold mirrors to your ghosts. That’s just what came out. And Spencer had to damn near beg me to leave it as such, because I was like, “Well, maybe if we put …”’He was like, “No, leave it.” And it was very hard for me to hear myself in that way, but I am proud that I did because that is the point of this record. It’s not for the aficionados. It is genuinely a songwriter’s album where you are literally cracking yourself open and trying to heal from that crack. And that’s the vocal progression. To me, I’m proud of that, because that’s the hardest thing you could ever do as a vocalist, is to choose to simplify.

That’s what it sounds like on this album — that your voice is literally almost on the verge of tears at points. But I feel like your voice has always had that quality, even in Danity Kane. There was a trauma or a sadness in your voice that contrasted with the rest of the group. Would you say your voice has always had this kind of pain in it even when you were singing more upbeat pop songs?

I don’t think it’s pain. I think it’s my tone. It’s a tonality. I think my tone is just very different, and it has this alto/tenor approach. But I also am very passionate about the approach of the records. The story is a part of the tone. And I think because pop is bright and you lean toward soprano tones, brighter tones, major tones, mine is minor and dissonant or heavy sometimes. I also believe that because Andrea was so bright in her tonality and mine was so dark, it became the basis of our sound for Danity Kane, which was her taking the top melody and me taking the octave down. That would become the standard for us as a group. We had a format as Danity Kane, of how we would go in and record. Andrea and I would always be on the melody. And I think people got so used to it, because it was so different, that became the sound of Danity Kane. Not to say I was it, but I’m saying we understood our tones, and my tone just happened to work well in that darkness against Drea’s brightness. Which, to me, made us unique within pop culture, right? Because we became a girl group that had a very different sound than that brightness that pop culture would expect within a girl group.

I mean, I would say that you were the voice of Danity Kane.

I would not say that because I don’t want anyone murdering me in a corner or a closet. I would say all five of us were, but I do understand why people would feel that because my tone was so different and I think it added something. I do agree that it was an accessory that added something different to the dynamic of what you think of when you think of pop music. And it changed the direction of what our music became. I think us understanding the use of that created an interesting sound for Danity Kane. I appreciate you saying that it was, and I’m grateful that people think highly of my voice in that way. But I will always give credit to all five of us that we understood the dynamic of what that was. I do agree that my tone stood out because it was an alto tenor living as a lead in a pop group where sopranos thrived during that era. If you think about Beyoncé or the Spice Girls or Dream, all of those. The soprano rang supreme. Christina, like, all those were sopranos.

I feel like this record is still pop in a way. The music is ambient, but even in the song “Diet,” the lyrics utilize these sorts of pop-esque motifs and symbols. It’s like these lyrics that could be in a Top 40 radio song, but they’re set to this very dark ambient music. And again, it’s that contrast that I think makes it so different.

You nail it. And that’s one thing that I feel like I speak about a lot, even being in Danity Kane as a Black woman. I don’t want to go to color because I think we need to get out of it. But I do think when I was in Danity Kane as a writer, when I wrote for the girls, we were a predominantly mixed girl group, right? Now when I write the same records, but when it isn’t a girl group and it’s just a Black woman singing it, it isn’t pop anymore. These melodies aren’t seen as pop when they are, even if they’re against these things. So I always have a fun time showing the possibilities of that, which you just said. The juxtaposition of that. Juxtaposition is what makes music fun. I want to show the flexibility in that. That is important to me. So the satirical part of “Diets” also shows that in your trauma, sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying, right? And pop, to me, does that well, where sometimes these issues are real, but the satire puts some relatability into it. Not taking it so seriously that you lose yourself in the process.

Is there a Danity Kane song you go back to that you’re particularly proud of? And then from this record, is there a song or specific lyric that you’re like, “Damn, I wrote that.”

For DK, the interludes have been a thing for me since the beginning. I’ve been very purposeful about that. Danity Kane is known for the interludes. I’m very proud of the interludes that I’ve written for Danity Kane, because they are these records that people wish were longer and there were more of. It almost makes them better than the songs because of it. “Flashback” was one of those records, as well as “Secret Place.” And then also a record called “Lights Out” that I did on Welcome to the Dollhouse because of the choice of counter melodies and the way in which we used the vocals. Each girl intertwined their voice. No girl ever sang more than two lyrics at a time, so it was constantly interchanging. So it showed the power again of literally using each girl’s voice as an instrument to the point where every girl was the lead, to the point where we sounded like one person. I’m very proud of that because that included the entire group in a way that I felt like showed the power of what we could be as a unit.

And then I’d have to say, I’m really, really proud of “Diets.” Yeah, it’s such a good song. That and “Traditions” off this album, I think might be some of my best melodic and choice of writing that I’ve ever done. “Traditions” speaks to my culture and my family, but the melody is timeless to me, and “Diets” to me is just clever. It’s so clever and so relatable to everybody’s journey. But then the music is so not that that it is. It makes for such an interesting record, and it is also very short, which means it’s a tease that I think leaves people wanting more. When I think about where I want to go as a musician and how I want to make music that is classic and timeless, these records, to me, will fit in that. They will last 20 years from now.

You talked about dealing with a lot of hard family stuff during the making of this record, and I saw you say that you had to do a lot of healing on your own. Your family didn’t have the most open view of therapy and stuff like that. How has New Orleans and your home life played a part in this release?

New Orleans is in everything that I do because I’m so rooted in the culture of it. My parents are home now, and I come there often. New Breed was an homage to my father. I sampled a lot of his music in that project. Second Line was a lot of my mother and my relationship with her. Quiet is the entire family. Where musically and artistically, my family led the narrations of my albums, life led the narration of this one in the sense that the traditions of New Orleans are heavy because I’m home a lot. My father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. My mom just got diagnosed with breast cancer, so I’m now with her. Like I said, my cousin was murdered. Shot seven times. And I had to watch my aunt bury an only child. I only have one aunt, that’s it. So that was my only first cousin. We were very close. That was extremely difficult, and New Orleans played the backdrop of that in many ways. I wanted to tell the evolution of the bright as well as the realities of what goes on — the crime that happens in New Orleans, the music, the highlights, but also how family has to come together through loss. All of that is a part of it, which is why “Traditions” talks about these things that carry on through our families that others may look at and not understand. There are things that to us make sense but other people may see it as “superstitious.”

With the deaths in my family and when we needed to have these moments, they carry on as traditions. So a lot of the influence of New Orleans and the things that have happened have been the storylines of my life, right? New Breed was very much again, a musical. I had just gotten home. I had just got back with the Indians, and so that brightness and that experience was within New Breed. For Second Line, I had been home for a while. My mom was very much present. I was trying to introduce electronic culture into New Orleans, so it was very progressive and very much like a nuance to dance culture within that space and how New Orleans lifted that. Pigments was about the contemporary choices, how I grew up in dance and movement, and how NOCCA and these contemporary arts were influences that helped me show the dynamic of what New Orleans was, right?

And now here we are with Quiet, where New Orleans became the backdrop for… It’s the basis of my trauma. Let’s be real, you know? My mom grew up Catholic. They believe God is better than a therapist. When the root of your trauma has been carried for so long, you recognize as you get older that you haven’t necessarily let go of those things. So I’ve had to be strategic about how I go through my trauma because my parents don’t understand. And I’ve also had to watch them go through their trauma based off their illnesses and their sickness. Watch my aunt go through her trauma of losing her child, and all those things created for an honesty within the backdrop of New Orleans. I’m consistent in New Orleans being the backdrop of that. So you’ll get those hints of the cultures still very much present in all of my albums, and it’s in this one as well. When we talk about, like you said, how I went through the therapy, a lot of times I’d have to secretly go through therapy in that way. Or sometimes, here’s the thing, I couldn’t afford therapy like that. Like what I necessarily needed, I didn’t have the pleasure of actually getting. So a lot of times, music has become the therapist for me. That’s a whole other conversation where the cards I got dealt in this industry weren’t pleasant. And I’ve spoken about that, I’ve been very open about that in my music, and every time we’ve talked, I put that in the lyrics. So therapy for me has had to be this, and I will say to you, the music I’ve made with Spencer has been some of the best therapy and healing I’ve ever had.

So you live in New Orleans full-time?

Between here and LA. So I have a space in LA that I rent out, but because of the reality of my situation with my family, I’ve had to be home a lot.

As you get older, do you feel yourself becoming the caretaker of your parents?

Oof! Understatement.

They say that one sibling always takes the brunt of the emotional labor in that way. I have one older brother, but I find as I’m getting older, I can feel that role will probably be mine.

You just named it. I have an older brother, but he has a wife and three children, so he can’t. And I am the baby, but it’s pretty much all on my shoulders, and it’s heavy.

Yeah, it’s kind of a mind-fuck.

Yeah, man. It’s so heavy. And on top of all the other things, it’s heavy, which is why this album is needed on so many levels. I really believe this, and the record is the truth. I’ve always been a private person. I’ve always been a recluse in that sense, which is why all of this is really fucking a lot for me on many levels, because if you know me, you know I live through the art, and then I’m gone. I’m not on red carpets. I don’t have a reputation to be something that is not who I am. And so the reality is that I would love to just be the quiet in a lot of situations. The silence is more for me than anything. I didn’t plan for this, but I knew I felt this. And at this moment, this album could not be more honest to where I feel I want to be in my life right now. Based off of all the shit, I really just want to be the quiet.

Do you think your parents are gonna listen to this album? Like, do they bump your music?

Oh, my God. My parents are my biggest fans of all time, but they have not heard this album, okay? I’ve purposely not [shown them]. They’re hearing it as it comes out. My aunt has not heard “Life in Numbers.” No one has heard “Life in Numbers.” I am deathly afraid of her hearing it. For “Life in Numbers,” I did not write that down. The record played, and I was really going through it. [My cousin] Cisco died last year on January 1. He died on New Year’s Day. His birthday was February 1, which means he died a month before his 30th birthday. So when I got this music, it only had been three months in. It was fresh. And I just went in. I listed all the things, and I felt like life was like those Color By Numbers books and it was beating me up. It was just 10 numbers, and I just described what it felt like. And, yeah, no one’s heard that yet.

Well thank you so much for talking to me.

Thank you. I want to say one thing. I hope that, though this felt heavy, that in the end, it felt hopeful, which is why we ended with “Try.” I don’t ever want my albums to feel like you can’t get out of it. So whatever you’re going through, I hope that it does heal you. Even though it is falling, that means you’ll get back up, right?

Photography: Clifford Usher