Imani Sharp on Tenderness as Strength

There’s something homely about the way Imani Sharp speaks, a quality that makes you lean in, that feels like a suspension of heaviness. It is the same energy that permeates her music: an invitation to soften, to slow down, to create safety in vulnerability rather than armoring up.

Tenderness is Imani Sharp’s rebellion. It is architecture founded by a radical act of staying gentle in a world that insists on hardness.

"I try to always be first and foremost honest," she tells me, unguarded and fresh from a shower with damp hair in her InBluem robe. "Balancing being extremely honest with being extremely considerate of what I do and don't know." It's this exact precision in the delicacy of calibration, between certainty and curiosity, between knowing and wondering, that runs clearly through both her artistic practice and her approach to moving through the world.

Imani’s philosophy of softness isn't passive or weak; it's architectural and deeply intelligent, built from childhood lessons learned in a rough household. The lesson was simple: when faced with rigidity, don't get stiffer, tenderise yourself. Her mother appears a source of deep wisdom for her in anchoring herself to gentleness, Imani referencing her several times throughout the duration of our topical meandering. 

"If you punch something hard, it's going to react more than a pillow. It’s kind of about being the pillow, being soft" she explains, her metaphor simple but profound. We discuss how her stubbornness is an essential balancing to this, so as to avoid absorption without boundaries. And how for Imani it’s about choosing your reaction, about remaining malleable enough to maintain your values while navigating whatever comes your way.
The approach has opened doors that rigidity or walls couldn't. "In relationships, in helping others and helping yourself, if you're not gentle, you hold on to shit so much," she reflects. "When you soften, even just your face or your body, it's such a key to being super present."

Imani’s relationship with digital spaces reflects this same spaciousness to remain sovereign. Having grown up without early access to social media with no phone, and no Facebook until high school, she developed an outsider's perspective. One that has allowed her to find an acceptable distance between perception and her lived reality, especially as her audience grew. 

This distance also gave her the ability to use these platforms intentionally rather than reactively, existing outside of the rules of normative use. "We're all just mirrors for each other," she observes about online perception. "We select people and we either see the best of ourselves in them or we see the things we cringe about ourselves in them."
Her Instagram presence reflects an awareness of what it means to be curated but authentic, offering glimpses into a world built around genuine curiosity rather than performance. "I hope that when people look at what I post, they see more value in backing yourself with what you enjoy, not just putting on a face."

Imani’s relationship with her own appearance and beauty over time evolved from the external to the essential. Growing up Japanese-Australian on the Gold Coast, she learned early that she couldn't fit conventional beauty standards and so sought a deeper anchor. "From a young age I had to let go of physical beauty being a strong point… And I think that's something that consistently we have to unlearn and be mindful of is our relationship to beauty: what and why we find things beautiful.”

Despite being someone who has created her own standard of admired beauty, for Imani, the concept of beauty we receive as women requires deeper inquisition of why a thing is truly beautiful. "There is nothing more beautiful than having a conversation and being heard and seen," she continued. "We have to upkeep learning and understanding what we love and how we love it. That's what's really beautiful."

Sharp's upcoming EP, titled "Rough" (an ode to softness philosophy), represents what she calls a full-circle moment in her creative process. For years, she found it difficult to transition from creation to release, comfortable with the "bedroom music" intimacy of making songs but feeling resistance to release it to the world.

"It was like a self-therapising journal diary entry in its own cryptic way," she explains of her music-making process. "But when it got to the releasing part, I would become super rigid again, like, 'Well, no, this is mine. What if no one gets it?'"

The breakthrough came in recognising the hypocrisy: creating music as an exercise in softening, then hardening around the fear of being misunderstood. "Now it's like this full-circle movement, letting go and feeling actually really excited about releasing."

Working on her first music video as a collaboration with Director, Yasmin Suteja, became an unexpected education in collaboration, teaching her to extend her softness practice beyond containment. "It's funny because making this video has allowed me to step back and not be in co-producing and writing mode where I'm like, 'Oh my god, is this single syllable of the word at the right level?'"

The visual component also offered something more bolstering: context. "I would freak out about being misunderstood in music, so when you have the video, it's another opportunity of guiding what my intention was." And being able to visually bring the gathered parts of film, music and ingested art together to world-build is a new pleasurable discovery for Imani: “The thing that excites me is when I can already see how my extra ingredient with somebody else's ingredient is making something really beautiful.” 

Her collaborators on this EP, Producer, Aidan Rahman and Angus “Rapallo” who helped with mixing, are a huge part of this unfurling towards healthy inward and outward exchange. “We owe it all to like the people we are around and the people that we trust to be our rearview mirrors.”

When I ask about her closure process, of projects and relationships in general, Sharp laughs referencing a metaphysical cupboard behind her begging to stay closed. "Have I ever said goodbye to anything? I'm just a hoarder of life." After a few beats, more earnestly she then stays to consider: “Don't let the thing you're saying goodbye to be nothing. What do you want it to be? Do you want it to be building blocks or do you want it to be a wall? You know, you choose.”

Embodying non-violence with an expert approach to endings mirrors her approach to everything else: gentle, grateful, and grounded in the understanding that nothing is permanent. "If goodbyes become hellos again, it's never going to be the same, it's not picking up the same book. You'll be the next book."

There's an omnipresent assuredness about Sharp's insistence on tenderness in a world that often mistakes softness for weakness. Her music, created from what she calls "those quiet moments with yourself, whether they're moments of backing yourself or doubt," offers an alternative to the aggressive self-optimisation that dominates so much contemporary culture. “We can acknowledge when there's healing to do but you can only really achieve that if you do it kindly towards yourself.”

"I love music that when you feel down, you feel heard, but you don't feel too affirmed in feeling down," she says. "It's like, 'Okay, get up, sweetheart.'"

This is notably one of Imani’s greatest gifts: the ability to hold space for difficulty without drowning in it. In a culture increasingly defined by its edges, she's carving out space for something more fluid, more forgiving, more fundamentally human. Something that remains soft without becoming shapeless. 

After an hour of speaking, with zero desire to cease the conversation, we come back to the idea of gingerly navigating uncertainty. Sharp returns to the central theme: the practice of being gentle with ourselves as we navigate uncertainty. "Let's give ourselves a bit more space to not know what the fuck is going on," she suggests, her mother's wisdom echoing in her words. "We can acknowledge when there's learning to do and healing to do, but you can only really achieve that if you do it kindly towards yourself."

In a world that often feels like it's moving too fast, too hard, too rigid, Imani’s sonic and visual world offers something different: an incentive to slow down, a reminder to soften up, and find strength in the spaces between certainty and wonder. It's a quiet happening, one that starts with the radical act of being gentle with yourself.