DENA Wants Everything and Isn’t Sorry

DENA released her debut mixtape Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools in 2012 and it landed like something airlifted from an alternate 1993—lush R&B production, braggadocio, an aesthetic that felt retro and completely current at the same time. The Berlin-based artist had a self-possession about her that most debut acts spend years trying to fake. She showed up already knowing exactly what she was doing.

The title is a list of desires delivered without apology, which is really the whole thesis. There’s something almost refreshing about wanting material things loudly and without the usual indie pretense of being too cool for comfort. The music matched: low-slung, confident, unhurried. You believed her completely.

She never quite crossed over to the international attention she probably deserved, which tends to be the fate of artists working out of German cities with very good taste and not quite enough machinery behind them. But Cash, Diamond Rings, Swimming Pools holds up as a document of a particular Berlin cool that felt briefly and genuinely exciting in those years—before the city’s reputation became its own worst cliché.