Vulnerability doesn’t come easily to everyone. As the daughter of a preacher, raised in a family where hard discussions and honesty at the dinner table just didn’t happen, Precious Pepala needed to find an outlet.

“When you don’t find a way of getting negativity out, it comes out in negative ways,” she said. “The only way for me to talk about my feelings was through music. Especially when I was questioning a lot of things about religion and dealing with years and years of pent up guilt because my parents love this thing so much and I don’t. Writing music about it gave me a way to say to my parents ‘I'm not like you’. Music put it into words for me. It was a way to open the door for those difficult conversations to happen.”

The songs on Dark Days are those conversations. From religion to queerness, sexual assault to finding strength again after becoming an independent artist, the EP doesn’t just track Precious’ journey, but is the words she needed to move through it and move past things. 

After being signed to a major label when she was a teenager, this EP marks a rebirth of Precious Pepala. “I'm older, so I'm a lot more likely to say no to people than I was when I was 16,” she said, “I've got my voice and I know what I want, and I’ve got a vision and I put that into this project.”

Barely five feet tall and barely an adult, wrapped in a look and a life story that is far from the stereotypical expectation in her lane; Precious Pepala takes pride in being underestimated, it reminds her of her power. “I know I've got a small stature, but there's big things that I want to talk about, and there's big ideas that I've got to share with the world,” she said as Dark Days shares the conversations that saved her to an audience she hopes to help too.