That’s because Meresha is at ease in all contexts and crowds. Although she’s based in South Florida, she’s a true global citizen, and her music reflects the breadth of her experience. She makes pop that exists comfortably at the intersection of traditions and styles: part tropical, part Euro-electronic, part contemporary, part extraterrestrial. In summer 2021, she took us to “Hawaii” with a successful globetrotting single that demonstrated her wanderlust, her knack for crowd-pleasing melody, and, yes, her taste for trouble. “The magic of life is outside taking chances,” she teased us in the verses, “who knows what you’ll find?”

There’s reason to believe that the planet simply isn’t big enough to accommodate all of her adventurous impulses. Meresha calls her style Alien Pop, and it’s not hard to hear why. Her voice is stratospheric, her taste in instrument sounds is otherworldly, and her perspective is consistently extraordinary. On “Trouble,” she matches her tale of desire and transgression to a slinky synthesized string groove, drapes her mix in silky backing vocals, and drives it all home with thumping percussion. You can dance to it, yes — but it’ll probably be the sort of dance that gets you dangerously close to your partner.

About the video

No American city mixes Caribbean and North American influences quite as audaciously as Miami does, and no neighborhood in Miami foregrounds that fusion as plainly as Little Haiti. For years, it’s been the center of South Floridian artistic ferment — a thriving, colorful area filled with all kinds of trouble. That’s exactly where you’d expect to find an artist like Meresha, and in the “Trouble” clip, she rides her bicycle boldly down NW 71st Street after dark. In the shadow of the interstate, she’s presented with some troublesome opportunities by a handsome man. The next thing you know, she’s twisting through the fluorescent lights of the dancefloor, dazzling with every step, daring the viewer to come closer.