Essence Martins is on the rise

Before finding her bearings as a singer-songwriter, Martins had a natural talent for tennis. This was reinforced by the encouragement of her parents, who instilled a tireless drive and determination within her early on. With daily training and enrolment into a full-time tennis academy, Martins was good. Good enough to earn matches, and good enough to land a scholarship at a college in North Carolina, 4,000 miles away from her home of North West London.

Although it would seem as though Martins had her path as a professional athlete laid out clearly in front of her, something was nagging at her. No matter how hard she tried to throw herself into playing tennis, Martins had unfinished business. Music constantly found its way to the forefront of her mind, and ultimately, it would become the first thing she’d choose for herself.

For Martins, music was always there. When I ask about the earliest moment that she found a sense of connection with it, she walks me through a memory of Sunday morning cleaning with her parents and three sisters. When we speak, it’s a surprisingly sunny day for February in London, and it sets the tone for the warmth of her recollection. “I’ve always loved music growing up. I think that’s because I grew up around it,” Martins tells me. “On Sundays, my family and I would always clean the house with the music blasting. It was kind of like a chore day, but it was also kind of fun!”

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She also recalls appreciating music within a theatrical context, citing Sister Act and High School Musical as influential films that she watched growing up. “We would watch them and just sing along, and there’s a sisterhood in that,” Martins says. “We’d even learn the dance moves. I mean, I’m awful at dancing, but it felt like it was a big part of everything. It was ingrained.”

Beyond the films, Martins was able to observe what it was like to be a musician in practice within her own household. Her older sister, Bernice, was classically trained in piano, in addition to playing saxophone, and clarinet. “She could read music and everything, and she was very passionate about it,” Martins says, a sense of admiration in her tone. At around seven years old, she decided to give piano lessons a try for herself. “I remember really enjoying piano lessons,” she reflects. “I remember being able to take away the names of the notes, which did help when I came back to it when I was seventeen. I was able to figure out how to form my own chords from them.”

But as Martins had just enough time to develop a few foundations of music theory, piano lessons began to shift to the periphery. It was at that time that Martins and her twin sister Destiny were getting into regular, intensive tennis training, with the sport quickly becoming the main focus for the pair. “My dad would come into certain lessons and say, ‘Okay, when’s it over? We need to go, they need to get to practice.’ So tennis was the main thing, it was probably more important than school, more important than anything else,” Martins explains.

While she accepted the commitment to tennis as a child, things began to change as she got older. In her early teen years, she often listened to what was considered popular at the time. “It was stuff like Drake and Nicki Minaj. All of these really popular artists, I really loved them,” Martins muses. But by the time she turned sixteen, she started developing her own personal music taste, opening her eyes to harder pop-punk sounds. “I became obsessed with Paramore,” she muses. “It was a lot of punk-pop, And interestingly, a lot of people found my music taste a little bit weird, so I felt like I had to hide the music that I really liked. When people would ask, I’d just say, ‘Oh, I’m into R&B’. I was into it, but started to grow into more punk sounds.”

When I ask about Martins’ experience of concealing her musical interests, she opens up about the sense of disconnect that she felt with her peers. “When I’d be honest about what I was listening to, and someone would just say, ‘That’s really weird’, I suddenly knew I couldn’t be honest,” she admits. “My family and real friends, they don’t care. But I remember being in my sixth form school, and I really didn’t connect to anybody there.”

Rather than writing off her interests, Martins continued to explore them in private, finding safer, more accepting spaces to build on them. “It was kind of a blessing in disguise, because I didn’t really want to be there. And because of that, I found my own solitude in the music room,” she explains. “And then I found my own people in the music room. That kind of escapism allowed me to be in a different space.” From this point, Martins even started taking an interest in more indie music, with Phoebe Bridgers in particular serving as a potent source of inspiration. “I just thought, ‘What is this?’ I’d never heard music that feels like that before. Where you can just say anything. It didn’t feel like there was any formula, it felt like she was expressing exactly what was on her mind at that moment. I didn’t know you could do that.”

This also unlocked a different autonomy for Martins who, having left the tennis academy, was learning how to balance her time in the music room with her time on the court. She was learning covers and figuring out her own melodies, inspired by the likes of Taylor Swift, Arlo Parks, and Snail Mail. “I was exploring what I wanted to, and I didn’t really have my dad watching over me as much,” she tells me. “The pressure was more on my sister, which allowed me to fall into the cracks. So after classes, between classes, sometimes during classes, I would be in the music room doing my own thing, but at the end of the day I would go to training.”

Despite sometimes skipping class or tennis lessons in favour of playing music, Martins excelled at school and accepted the opportunity to study abroad. This wasn’t an easy transition, however, as it came with a sense of isolation and disillusionment that was hard to shake. “I was excited to experience a different stage in my life, to live somewhere different, and to grow. And I loved my team out there, I had the best time with them,” she recalls. “But I had a really horrible coach who would just pick on me. And being the only black girl on the team, I felt this isolation at times. And even though I loved parts of it, I got to a point of thinking, ‘I hate it here’. So I gave up in the sense that I was going to stop caring about what everybody else thinks, and just play. It was the first time I really tapped into playing good tennis, and that was super freeing.”

When the global pandemic hit, it gave Martins a break, and a sense of perspective on what she really wanted. Forced to return home to London, she found herself with significantly more time to create. Having received a guitar for her eighteenth birthday, just before she set off for university, she just wanted to write songs. “When I could finally do that with the freedom of being at home, it made me realise that I didn’t really want to be out there anymore,” Martins reveals.

It was then that she knew that she had to tell her parents the truth about not just her true passion, but also the difficult experiences that she faced while at university. “I remember telling my parents that I didn’t think I could go back. They were like, ‘We know it’s been a hard year, but if you try one more and don’t want to stay then you can come back home’. Then I told them what happened, and I think in being honest, they understood. All I wanted to do was write songs. When they finally accepted that and I got into uni here, that was it. That was me letting go of my past and actually becoming myself for the first time, which is very scary, but freeing as well.”

In 2023, Martins made a significant stride in letting go by releasing her debut single, “Pending Status”, which was later followed by her debut EP Deer In The Headlights released in 2024. It was her third year university project, she tells me, and it captured how she felt about making the jump from tennis to music. “I was having a lot of fun exploring sounds,” she says of the EP, a six-track collection of songs centred around acoustic guitar-led melodies and Martins’ clean, delicate vocal style. “I titled it Deer In The Headlights based on a lyric in one of my songs, ‘Like A Fool’, because my transition from tennis to music still felt so new. I really felt like this little baby in this big, scary industry. I wanted to write a body of work that was like, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it anyway.’”

When she released her second EP Sleeping On It just a year later, Martins had figured out her sound. Working with her producer, Jules, who also worked on her EP, she managed to confidently define her folky, indie-pop sound. Across her work — which has captured the attention of musicians including Demi Lovato, Rachel Chinouriri, and Jill Scott — Martins delves openly into themes of mental health, unrequited love, and sisterhood. And as she looks to what’s next, she wants to unlock more. “I feel like I’m always honest with my work, but with this one, I’m just pulling out even more from myself,” Martins asserts. “As we grow older, we gain all of these scars, we get hurt, and then our skin gets thicker. But sometimes we lose who we are,” she muses. “It’s really important to take all of those layers off every now and again, and be your true self.

With her new single, “Please, Don’t Wake Me”, she’s specifically learning how to open up about her feelings regardless of the consequences. “Please don’t wake me in the morning / Just to say that you’ll be leaving shortly”, she sings, her urgent plea expressed through airy harmonies, firm acoustic strums, and a drum groove grounded in its longing. While Martins calls out for her love to be recognised, she insists that all experiences — even instances of heartbreak — are reflective of a life lived. “Go through your heartbreak, love. Even though that can be risky, let yourself get hurt, and learn from it.”

“Even though I’m writing these songs, it’s not like I’ve perfected the lessons within them,” she continues. “I’m writing them because I need to learn these lessons. I want to work on letting go, feeling my feelings from the beginning to the end, and not being so closed off all the time.”

Part of that comes from getting comfortable with performing the songs on stage, regardless of how intimate they may be. Martins is no stranger to being thrown into the deep end when it comes to performing, as she tells me, as her first-ever experience playing with a band was playing with Birdy, an artist that she has long admired. From that, she’s world out how to get over the fear of something new. “When you first do it, it’s really vulnerable because it’s new,” Martins admits. “But after a lot of repetition, it gets easier. It’s like muscle memory. There are some songs I used to cry while singing because they were so vulnerable, but if I practice them, I’m used to that emotion and I can control it on stage.”

As Martins takes me through her journey, from tennis courts to recording studios, it’s clear that the drive has never left her — it’s simply found its rightful home. “I did not think I was going to have a career in music. It was just something I was doing for fun,” she smiles, seemingly surprised by the results of her own perseverance. “But I desperately needed this area to express emotion in and feel my own sense of freedom. Tennis was chosen for me, but music was the first thing I actually chose to do.”