Empara Mi: conquering the world of TV sync & her new album

After coming back from a confidence-destroying major label experience, Empara Mi is a cinematic pop artist whose music has been heard in Transformers, The Traitors, Fortnite, and Our Planet. She also provided vocals for the drum and bass hit Freedom by Sub Focus and Wilkinson. With her new singles, I Can’t and Masochist getting big Radio 1 plays and millions of views on YouTube, her life as a now independent music artist is taking a very exciting turn.

Born and raised on the Isle of Guernsey, Empara Mi is now based in London while splitting some of her time back by the beach. On the fact that her career has been largely defined by so many of her songs landing in big TV shows and trailers, she says, “I didn't quite get into it to go that way, but accidentally, in a fantastic way, that's been the way my music has found its place. I love the super cinematic sounds and everything. So it lends itself to that world quite nicely. It's a great way for people to actually discover me.

“I'm lightly adding the word composer to what I'm doing at the moment. I've just been brought on to a new series to help compose the music. I won't say the name yet, otherwise I'll get thrown off it. I just love that my music is cinematic enough that it ends up in these amazing programmes that I'm already watching.”

Empara Mi arrived via her 2016 single Wanderlust. It introduced the world to her big, soulful vocals, more often than not layered with a choir of her own backing vocals, almost on an operatic scale. A year later, she would be collaborating with UK star Kojey Radical on Spoon, where her cinematic pop world met Radical’s hip hop lyricism.

Unsurprising for someone of her ambition, Empara Mi was keen to spread her wings beyond the Channel Islands and be based somewhere where she could make all-important music connections.

“I begged my parents to let me leave, which is terrible,” she says. “But I wanted to go away and see if people in the real world do this as well, and be around like-minded people. So I left at 15 and went to a school that did quite a lot of music, and to please my parents, I did a history degree, which is not exactly what I wanted to do. 

"But two weeks after I finished, I was straight in there, trying to meet people in the industry. I got my first ‘in’ through the genius who owns Rinse. He brought me in to do some writing sessions, and then he showed my music to people at some majors. I ended up signing to RCA, which, in hindsight, was not the best decision. I made an album that we didn’t end up releasing. I released one introductory track with them.”

While such an experience is very rough, to the point where many artists might even quit entirely, for Empara Mi — the label even took her to the BRIT Awards and told her she’d be winning awards within a year — it was a valuable learning experience that set her on the independent path she finds herself on now.

“I learned a lot about the industry during that time. I started my own label, Spinning Circle, moved all my stuff out of that deal into my label, and that's pretty much where the sync stuff started. And then that's when supervisors started messaging me, and they seemed to think Spinning Circle must have more artists than just this random person. They were asking me, ‘Have you got jazz music? What else have you got on the roster?’

“And I was like, ‘Oh, this is interesting. They think I'm more than one person.’ I knew there were lots of producers and artists who had stayed independent, who I knew owned their own masters, publishing everything. So I started putting them forward for little sync opportunities. I accidentally built a little community of us pitching for these opportunities for sync stuff. And that is essentially why I'm able to do anything now, because of those opportunities that came from those TV programmes which used my music.”

And just to give an idea of how well that has gone for her, Empara Mi’s songs have been heard in Netflix hits such as Ginny & Georgia and Behind Her Eyes. 

The syncs have also landed her in Transformers, The Traitors, Fortnite, Riviera, and Dynasty, alongside global campaigns for Apple. In 2024, she lent her vocals to Our Planet II and Mammals, which saw her collaborating with Coldplay. She also covered God’s Gonna Cut You Down for the Eddie Redmayne hit show Day of the Jackal.

But the TV music is only one part of the Empara Mi story. 2025 has been a very busy year of single releases for her, with her three singles so far garnering millions of YouTube views for her cinematic music videos and tens of thousands of streams. 

First up was I Can’t, receiving generous airplay from BBC Radio 1. In the video, we see her standing in the sea, dressed in black and trying to lower herself into the water, but the dancers who surround her all hold her up. And it turns out that, despite working on shows like Our Planet II, she isn’t fond of the water at all.

“My relationship with the ocean is terrible. I have the worst phobia of the sea. Which is why it's so weird that I did my music video, the first one of this album, in the sea. But it's one of those where I'm trying to fight my fears. There is something incredible about watching the sea, just not being in the sea. 

"The song is about grief, which is why I’m wearing black. My parents don't follow me on social media, and they asked me how it’s all going. So it was nice telling them my first release from this album's already on Radio One.”

She followed this up with Masochist, which also found its way onto the Radio One playlist. It’s another great showcase of the Empara Mi sound: pop with a certain Adele scale and swagger, combined with strings, and the mystical and cinematic sounding production that makes it her own. 

She has, once again, matched the ambition of the song with a very slick music video, which has also shot up to over one million views on YouTube.

On whether she tailors some of her songs specifically with the sync world in mind, she says, “For this one, I definitely did. It was 100% for this song. I did it with a guy called Paul white. So we went to a studio, did the backing together. We were playing his synthesisers in real life. 

"So that was fun. And then I went home, and I realised it feels like a Bond-esque song. So I put on the Casino Royale trailer on mute and just wrote again and again over it. So when I listened back to my lyrics and the feeling of it, I am basically Daniel Craig,” she laughs. “And that's why I did this very dramatic music video with the swords and everything. I wanted to be some sort of warrior hero/villain type character.”

When asked what the phrase Play Out Loud means to her, Empara Mi says, “I would say connection. If we're talking about actually playing out loud. That's everything I feel like I'm missing, and everything I'm the most excited to do is actually connect to people in real life, playing out loud to people.”

And with the just-released, sensual single On Call For You out now and exploring Empara Mi’s hip-hop side, everything is set up wonderfully for the upcoming release of her new album, Monsters & Masochists. Go and check out her new singles now, before your favourite TV show plays them to you first.