In the summer of 2022, the release of Beyoncé’s Renaissance and Drake’s Honestly, Nevermind put a conversation about the origins of dance music being Black to the forefront. It’s a message AlunaGeorge singer-songwriter Aluna Francis has pushed forward since the lead-up to her 2020 debut solo album, Renaissance, when she shared an open letter to the dance music industry addressing its longstanding racial inequalities.

Though that particular conversation about the origins of dance music “does not need help” any longer with such big superstars joining the cause, Francis tells Consequence that her efforts to effect change in the industry have been met with a “fairly performative and fairly minimal” response from the status quo. The greater shift has taken place “from the outside,” where it is “down to individual communities serving their smaller communities.”

Francis’ attempt to launch the Noir Fever Festival with an all-Black lineup in partnership with the travel startup Pollen was a particularly eye-opening experience. Her team worked with Pollen for two years to develop the festival, only for it to be postponed ahead of the company’s collapse in August.

“To have interfaced with people who really don’t care, but lured me into a relationship where I’m thinking that we’re all on the same team and investing in the thriving future of the Black community in dance music and then it being a complete performance, I’m like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was possible,’” Francis says. However, she expects the genuine relationships formed in the process will “absolutely essential” to the future of Noir Fever.

Parallel with her work in the music industry has been Francis’ burgeoning career as a solo artist. Though it was somewhat of a risk to release Renaissance during the pandemic, doing so actually allowed the album to reach the right people while spotlighting dance music’s roots in the African diaspora. Citing fans’ messages about “how important that music was for them at that time,” Francis says she wouldn’t change anything about how it was released.

“I think it was a nice time to do something as risky as Renaissance because it didn’t have to sort of come out like, this is the next — it was a little bit ahead of its time, so for it to come out then was good because it’s like everything had slowed down a little bit,” Francis adds, before sharing her reaction to Beyoncé releasing a like-minded project with the same title two years later.