Amber Mark

Born on a farm in Summertown, Tennessee, to a Jamaican father and a German mother, Amber Mark spent her childhood in motion. Her mother, Mia Mark, was a painter devoted to thangka, a form of traditional Tibetan Buddhist art, and the two moved constantly in pursuit of her practice. They lived in Miami, Munich, Berlin, and a monastery near Darjeeling, India. Mark taught herself guitar on an instrument her mother gave her. Eventually, the family settled in New York City, where her godparents legally adopted her so she could attend Talent Unlimited High School, a performing arts school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

In June 2013, Mia died of breast cancer. Mark was nineteen. She began writing songs to process the loss, and in 2016 released her first tracks on SoundCloud, including "Monsoon," which sampled her mother's voice. The following year she put out 3:33am, a six-song EP on PMR Records. Each track mapped to a stage of grief, arranged in the order she actually experienced them. The title came from a recurring coincidence: whenever she looked at the clock during late-night writing sessions, it read 3:33.

Her 2018 follow-up, Conexao, showed a different side. Recorded partly in Portuguese, the EP included a cover of Sade's "Love Is Stronger Than Pride" that earned a personal blessing from Sade Adu herself. Mark's sound had always been hard to pin down. She once called it "R&B tribal," a reflection of the bossa nova, soul, funk, and hip-hop she absorbed across continents. But the Sade cosign signaled something: she could move between worlds and belong in all of them.

Three Dimensions Deep, her debut full-length album, arrived on January 28, 2022, through PMR and EMI Records. Its seventeen tracks split into three acts (Without, Withheld, Within), tracing a spiritual and personal arc shaped by her interest in astrophysics. Pitchfork noted the album moved "smoothly between R&B, funk, and pop," foregrounding her vocals and songwriting alongside celestial metaphors. NPR called it a record that "turns grief into undeniable beauty."

Her second album, Pretty Idea, followed on October 10, 2025, via Interscope and Jasmine/PMR Records. Where Three Dimensions Deep dealt in cosmic questions and loss, Pretty Idea zeroed in on romantic love in all its messy forms. Mark described it as being "all about boys, basically," exploring long-term relationships, short flings, and unrequited feelings. The record drew from '70s and '80s soul-funk, with Anderson .Paak joining her on the duet "Don't Remind Me." She launched a headlining North American and European tour behind it in early 2026.