Allow Amanda Reifer to reintroduce herself. You may recognize the free-spirited, Barbados-born songstress from her frontwoman days, leading the UK-based Barbadian band Cover Drive, but today, she’s all on her own.

Reifer is currently rolling out the project that’ll reignite her solo career, The Reifer Files. The forthcoming offering —comprised of earworm interludes, immersive visual content, and full-length songs that capture her essence through her fierce water sign perspective— serves as a preface to who Reifer is, and she’s ready to share it with the world.  

Speaking to BET.com, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter recalls the years of hard work that went into crafting her first solo body of work, which sees her operating from her highest form of creative and lyrical growth yet. “I'm excited to finally have it at a point where it's ready for the world,” Reifer says proudly, detailing how she wrote, directed, edited, and curated most of her project. “It's definitely been a creative process in many layers, and very intentionally so because I'm an artist through and through.”

Reifer recorded her upcoming eponymous project with a mission to reestablish herself as a solo act after bursting onto the scene with her band in the early 2010s. She acknowledges her group’s run as a great first industry experience but realized it was time to “explore who I am as a woman and an artist outside of the context of, you know, three guys,” she says. So, the ambitious singer picked up, moved over to Los Angeles, and started all over “in every sense of the word.” Still, she didn’t let that deter her from pursuing a destined solo path.

Today, Reifer is proud of where she is in her musical journey. She kicks it off with the ethereal video for her project’s swagger-filled intro, “B-tch Like Me.” “The song in itself is like a celebration of individuality,” Reifer boasts of the minute-long interlude. “That you will never meet a B-tch like me. I'll never meet a B-tch like you, girl. It's about owning that and being confident and being cocky if you have to about it.”

Filmed in her home country, Reifer saw it essential to return to her island roots as she began anew, starting with her project’s first track. Hence, the underwater, Pisces-fueled concept that sees the singer in her purest element, shedding material things as she begins her cosmic ascension. “I wanted [the video] to really capture where I'm from, be centered in home, and invite people into my world with the things that have made me who I am and brought this music where it is,” she explains. “The visual, it's about taking off all the things that weigh you down, letting go of all past stories, all things that you don't really need. It doesn't define who you are as you make your breach into the world. For me, [“B-tch Like Me”] represents also my breach into womanhood and as an artist coming through authentically, stripped down of any pretense, so to speak.”

Reifer meant it when she said she’d given her all to this new chapter. For the intro’s visual, she committed to having an all-Bajan crew pull her vision together and risked her life to do her own underwater stunts. 

“I had never free-dived a day in my life, and I was at the bottom of the ocean, 20 feet deep, with one safety scuba diver with me, just in case I started to drown. That's how serious it was,” the singer remembers her hours-long, same-day training. “It takes a lot of physical work and mental concentration, not only to deliver a great shot —and keep in mind I'm co-directing as I'm doing this—but also to make sure you're alive by the end of the shot. In other visuals, which are to come, there are a lot of risks I’ve taken. But for some reason, when it comes to my art and my music, I have this immense surge of bravery.”

“I do things I would not do in everyday life for the art and to get the messaging across,” Reifer adds. [My music] is very important to me, so I'll do everything for it.”

Everything that helped birth Reifer’s music career started in Barbados, from discovering her biggest influences to slowly nurturing her gifts. The singer says it “was honestly a dream” growing up on the tiny Caribbean island. “Everybody knows each other. Everybody is connected. It's a very supportive place,” she adds. “I grew up surrounded by friends, family, love, great food, and very connected to the earth. I'm an outdoors child, so I was definitely running around barefoot in the water.”

Water has always been Reifer’s safe space, a haven in which she’s found the truest parts of herself. She lucked up being surrounded by it for most of her upbringing. “The water has taught me so much,” she says. “I love it there. It's home for me. I really, really cherish the fact that I grew up in Barbados. I wouldn't change that for anything. It's my culture. It's in me, it's my roots, and it’s also fed me creatively.”

Reifer credits her drive to the Caribbean as being a “very creative place.” To her point, it’s there where she tapped into her love for poetry, words, and literature, which sparked her songwriting savvy around age 15. Soon enough, she formed a four-piece band with hometown friends, Cover Drive, and got signed to a record label in the UK straight out of secondary school. The group saw success in their active years, scoring three Top 10 and five Top 40 records on the official UK charts and opening up for fellow Bajan native Rihanna’s 2011 Loud tour. Their most popular single, “Twilight,” a pop-style summertime vibe track helmed by Reifer’s vocals, hit No. 1. But the lead singer wanted to see what she could accomplish on her own.

“I didn't even feel like I had a choice,” Reifer says of making a career out of music. “This is what I have to do. It is just in me. I knew from a very young age that this was what I was going to be doing, and I couldn't help but do it.”

A move across the pond put Reifer in the right creative space to connect with producers and dig into the songwriter grind. Writing for other people turned into writing for herself, which turned into writing The Reifer Files, her pride and joy. Creating the music, she says, was the easy part. Turning it into a full audiovisual experience was one of her biggest challenges, but it was still a great one. 

Sound-wise, the result is an eight-track project highlighting Reifer’s “fluid” style, accentuated by a melting pot of pop, reggae, hip-hop, and soul elements. At its core, though, the new music is “a great representation of who I am and the complexities of being a woman and being many things all at once,” Reifer notes.

“It taps into so many different qualities and characteristics of my own personality, but also of women in the world, and I want it to be received in that way,” she adds of the project’s universal appeal. “I want people to see us for our dualities, our complexities, our contradictions, but all these things can exist at once. We can be everything all at once. We can be soft and sexy, fierce and independent, and we can be vulnerable and hurt. We don't always have to be the boss, you know? I think it's that beautiful, complex blend of being a woman, being a human, and being honest about all of these different qualities about ourselves. That's what I’ve aimed to do and put into the music, so I hope that it is received that way.”

In case you haven’t caught on yet, Reifer is well into her introduction era (again), but she calls this particular one “Volume One”— promising more to come. “Every era is an introduction to who I am because I will constantly evolve and grow,” the singer proclaims. “And I will always bring that growth, truth, and authenticity to what I'm doing.”