On this two-part project, the breakout singer-songwriter processes events in her teenage years and early womanhood to find strength, courage, and power. There’s raw—and then there’s Skye Newman. The singer-songwriter (who grew up in Southeast London, hence this project’s postcode-nodding title) broke out in 2025 with “Hairdresser” and the arresting and star-heralding “Family Matters”, on which she detailed, and processed, the trauma of her upbringing. “Music is my safe space and my therapy,” Newman tells Apple Music. “Writing music makes me feel strong.” There’s plenty of strength across SE9, which Newman released in two halves. If 2025’s Part 1 told “stories I had experienced throughout my teenage and childhood years,” 2026’s Part 2—released seven months later and after two BRIT Award nominations and a BBC Sound of 2026 win—is about “how I’ve turned my life around,” says Newman. (Both parts are available to hear here.) “They’re stories about growth and finding my feet as a woman. I wanted to show how much you can grow and how things change.” Powered by the singer’s unvarnished, emotion-drenched, and Adele-recalling vocals, each chapter houses tales of friendship, heartbreak, and family pain. Yet things feel even more poignant on Part 2, as Newman writes herself into a stronger, better place, heralds her chosen family (on “Woman I Am”), and plucks up the courage to walk away from situations that have harmed her. “It’s learning how to choose yourself,” she says. “That’s exactly what Part 2 is about: it’s me choosing myself and it’s how I did that.” Here, Newman breaks down every track on SE9 with as much honesty as she pours into her music. Part 2 “Man of the House” “This song felt very in between Part 1 and Part 2 so that’s why I felt it was it was right to start with it. It was the one that was still in my teenage years and it was like the last moment of me being like, ‘I’m not going to allow somebody else’s problems to affect my life.’ Whereas the rest of the music here is more hopeful, more about growth.” “Crawling” “There’s strength in crawling—just because you’re not at your highest point yet and you’re not standing and walking tall, it doesn’t mean that you’re not growing, doesn’t mean that you’re not succeeding, doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get there. This song came very easily. A lot was going on in my life, and I was breaking a lot of ties with people and lifting a lot of weight off my shoulders. I had my producer [Ed Thomas] at the piano, and I just literally started singing the chorus and the rest just followed from there. I wanted to sing it in such a powerful way, so that people understand that you’re powerful for even just getting up off the floor.” “Walk” “Again, that was a song I wrote and it gave me power. The more I sang it and had people sing it back to me, the more it gave me strength to fully walk away. Sometimes I want my songs to be delicate but powerful, kind of in the way I’d describe a woman as being soft but still having power. Then, with some songs I want to show my masculine side and a more aggressive side, in a good way. For this song, we wanted more attitude—like ‘Hairdresser.’ It shows my fight and my attitude.” “Too Far South” “I wrote it after I had two quite aggressive seizures and I was in hospital for a week—they thought I had a bleed on my brain or a brain tumor. Then I found out it was because of stress. After seizures, your brain is very foggy, and I came out of hospital scared I was never going to be able to write music again. I got in the studio with my producer [Jonah Stevens], and he started playing the piano and I just started singing. The chorus was everything that I needed to say. I found my strength. I can be selfish. I can choose myself. I have to. Because at that point it felt like life or death.” “Traumatised” “My producer [Stevens] sent me a few tracks, and I got to the last track—it just stuck with me and I started singing. The song flowed out of me; I wrote it alone and in my kitchen. It was me realizing the stuff that I had been through in life and realizing how big of a deal it was. There were multiple people in my life that were making me feel like I was crazy and that I couldn’t be myself—that maybe I was too loud and I was too much. This song was me realizing: Maybe it’s not me.” “Lost Myself to a Man” “I’ve shown so much attitude coming into a lot of these subjects, but this was me going into womanhood and me just being OK with things that have happened. Accepting it for what it is and being able to be vulnerable about it. I wanted to keep it very, very stripped because it’s a very raw, real subject and so many women, men, whoever, will understand that feeling of losing yourself to someone and feeling so naked and vulnerable and like you have nothing left.” “Woman I Am” “I cried writing this—but tears of joy. Writing songs that are so personal can be hard sometimes, but this song was easy, and I just sobbed because I found so much strength in the people around me, in the women around me. We often center men, but when I felt my strongest was when I was with my girls and my women and that’s the most beautiful thing in the world to me. I realized that they saved my life. I sat within all the memories of me and my friends and my sisters and the women in my life and reminisced about everything they’d done for me. This was the most important song to be written.” “Vicious Cycle” “This is like ‘Family Matters’ part two. I wrote it at about the same time, but I wasn’t ready to release it. But I saw how much ‘Family Matters’ helped people and that made me think, ‘It’s time to dive deeper and let people know we’re in this together.’ You can feel so alone and think, ‘Why me?’ But it happens a lot and it’s more common than you think. We’re not the first people to go through it, but we’re going to be the first people to change it, to break the cycle.” Part 1 “FU & UF” “That song came about from many angry emotions. I’d had an argument with my partner, and it really bothered me. For a lot of our relationship, I’d been brushed off by him and his friends. I felt very distant from them and got pushed out from that group. I went into the studio not long after this had happened, and I was talking about it again with my producers, just gossiping really. I was like, ‘Fuck you and your friends,’ and they went, ‘Stop!’ and that was the song. We got straight into it, with me explaining how I was sick of what was going on. The person it’s written about has heard it and they’re actually fine with it now, but the first time I played it to him, it didn’t go well.” “Hairdresser” “I’d had a bit of an argument with one of my friends, and my sister was also going through issues with one of her mates. The song came out of a conversation in the studio. Not a lot of people write songs about your friends. With partners, you argue and you forgive and there’s a lot more leeway with it. But with friends, it’s different. Me and my friends are all very open and we discuss our issues. That’s why I wanted to make a song that says you’re going to argue with your friends and siblings, and I think every aspect needs to be talked about.” “My Addiction” “I wrote this song about the same person ‘FU & UF’ is about. It’s about being up and down. I constantly felt like I was being pulled in and pushed out and I couldn’t leave. Love, to me at that point, felt like an addiction. I’ll never judge anyone’s addiction or how they’re feeling because I understand how hard it is being with a person and being addicted. A lot of times I’ve met fans after my shows and people tell their stories and lay it all out on the line. That’s an incredible thing to experience. It can be quite heavy, but it’s something that I’m open to taking on because that’s what music’s about. That’s the person that I want to be for people.” “Out Out” “This is about a relationship where he would always want to go out with his friends, but it was never too much about us. I got left on the sidelines a lot. So I got to the point where we’d sat around for so long, and I was sick and tired of constantly watching everyone else go ‘out out.’ We’d plan something and then he’d argue with me and we’d end up canceling. I’d be left sitting waiting on my own and I was so sick of it. A lot of the time, I prefer writing on my own, but it’s nice when you do find people that inspire you because, when you’re sitting in a room and you’re talking about a situation, it’s good to hear another perspective. I’ll just be ranting about something and someone in the room will be like, ‘Stop, that’s a song.’” “Family Matters” “Music’s my therapy, and with this one I was sitting there going, ‘You’ve never worn these shoes, don’t mean my New Balance in blue,’ and I thought, ‘Great fucking first line,’ and then all those feelings flowed out of me. I’m the youngest in my family and we’re all adults now so when I wrote about them I did get a good response. My parents can understand their wrongdoings, and I hope it’s something they’ve listened to and they know I’m not writing from a place of trying to drag them down, but from my own experience. I love my family and obviously I would never want to hurt anyone, and I didn’t write it out of spite.” “Smoke Rings” “I wrote this song with my two producers [Boo and Luis Navidad], and one of their partners, Jo, who’s an incredible lady, came up with the concept. We were sitting outside and we were talking about memories as I was smoking, and she was like, ‘Oh, smoke rings. You can be lost in the smoke rings. That’s where you reminisce.’ And it grew from there. It’s about sitting in your feelings and having to replay so many things. I had a very, very strong, addictive, explosive first love, so a lot of music came out of that. I only really write about things that I love and am passionate about, so as much as there’s things that have hurt me in this music, it’s only because I had so much love there.”