Music for climate action: a global album featuring Nadine Shah, Charlotte Church & Maxine Peake Out Now

What happens when a collective of powerful women artists come together to translate the voices of nature into music? And when these women from different parts of the world bring this music into climate decision-making spaces to voice what data can’t do alone?

Art takes centre stage to do what it has always done: move people, shift perspectives and inspire action. This is why EarthSonic’s Flow project came to be over a year ago, and it’s now ready to take its next leap.

Today, Flow’s 16-track album is released, bringing together women artists of ten different nationalities and a remarkable range of musical traditions, genres, languages and perspectives around one shared element: water. The album gets released on the opening day of the UN Climate Change Conference COP31 in Antalya, Türkiye, where several of the artists, including Shingai, Keila, Sohini Alam, Bebé, OneDa and Gökçe Coşkun, will perform for policymakers, journalists, activists and international audiences, while also taking part in panel discussions.

This marks Flow’s return to COP, following performances in Brazil in 2025 and at London Climate Action Week in June 2026. Following these appearances, Flow was invited by the UNFCCC to return to the COP stage. In Antalya, the project is planning a series of events and collaborations with the UNFCCC, The Goals House, and the Entertainment & Culture Pavilion and other partners. Turkish singer Gökçe Coşkun will also join the programme.

“From changes in Bangladeshi weather patterns to blistering British summers no longer being unusual, I see the change in both places I call home. I am attending COP31 in Türkiye in the hope that the music of FLOW can remind people how we are all connected through nature and that this is a world of connection worth protecting,” said Flow artist Sohini Alam.

A musical journey across cultures

The Flow album moves across borders of sound and culture, bringing together artists whose music speaks to water through radically different experiences and traditions.

From the depth of the gothic pop textures of ‘The Well’, written by Mercury Prize-nominated British artist Nadine Shah, to the soft indie sound revealed in ‘The Secrets of Water’, by one of the most striking voices of Brazil’s new music scene Bebé Salvego, the album travels through folk, electronic music, tecnobrega, Bengali folk, spoken word and experimental sounds, taking the listener on a musical journey across a timeless musical stream.

British-Bangladeshi artist Sohini Alam blends traditional Bengali folk with contemporary trap in ‘Nodir Kuler Lagi Ami Kandi’, while transgender Brazilian artist Jaloo brings Sci-fi Brega, an experimental combination of tecnobrega, 8-bit electronic music, indie pop and traditional Latin rhythms to ‘I Never Die’. In ‘Let Me Be Water’, India-US artist Madame Gandhi combines percussive, meditative sounds, including recordings of a glacier melting in Antarctica, with affirming lyrics. Catalan-Icelandic artist Néfur, nominated Artist of the Year at the Icelandic Music Awards 2026, presents ‘The Mirror’, produced with field recordings of Icelandic melting glaciers and her voice.

Two striking tracks already released as singles have offered a first glimpse into the project: ‘Mhondoro’ by Shingai (Zimbabwe-UK), described as a ‘conservative anthem’ by Zimbabwean media, and ‘My Mother, The Ocean’ by Charlotte Church, an artistic plea to the waters.

Two further tracks deserve particular attention. ‘Samaúma’ by Brazilian artist Keila brilliantly weaves ecological knowledge about the Amazon’s flying rivers with references to historical Indigenous social movements such as the Cabanagem, cultural references to the legendary society of all-female warriors in Amazonian culture, and takes its title from the sacred samaúma tree, one of the most revered trees of the Amazon. Meanwhile, ‘The River She’, written especially for Flow by British actress Maxine Peake, is a spoken-word piece that adds another dimension to the album’s exploration of water, gender and memory.

From album to film

The album is the beginning of the story: mostly produced by Grammy award-winning Jennifer Decilveo and Brazilian/Venezuelan producer Alejandra Luciani, the album will also serve as the soundtrack to the Flow film: a new artistic documentary film, which shares the stories of women on the frontlines of water-related crises across eight countries: Brazil, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Tuvalu, Iceland, Borneo, New Zealand and the UK.

Set to premiere on World Water Day, 22 March 2027, in London, the film will also be accompanied by an immersive installation produced by Ben Sheppee (The Observatory), with both formats touring around the world, screening at film festivals and being presented in museums, cultural venues and universities and, most importantly, returning to the communities where the stories originated.

“Art has the power to denounce, to mobilize, and to imagine futures. Protecting the waters requires real commitment, structural change, and listening to the territories. We are there to remind them that the climate crisis has a face, a body, and a history,” said Brazilian Flow artist Bebé Salvego.

Bringing women’s voices to the climate conversation

Flow aims to raise awareness of how women worldwide are affected by water-related crises. Heatwaves and vector-borne diseases disproportionately affect women’s physical and mental health, amplifying existing gender inequalities. Flow’s mission is not only to bring Amazonian, Indigenous, migrant, transgender women and women of colour to the centre of the environmental dialogue, but to place art, culture and storytelling at the heart of the climate debate, as powerful tools for inspiring meaningful action.

Flow is part of EarthSonic and In Place of War, a global project that amplifies creativity in places impacted by conflict & climate change as a tool for positive change.

For more information, www.earthsonic.org / https://www.inplaceofwar.net/. The project is supported by Wellcome Trust and Observatory (@Observatoryldn).