Meet Malek Azrael

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Malek Azrael a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Malek, we’re thrilled to have you sharing your thoughts and lessons with our community. So, for folks who are at a stage in their life or career where they are trying to be more resilient, can you share where you get your resilience from?

Resilience – the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly and overcome from difficulties or toughness. This is the definition of resilience. It isn’t always easy to bounce back and pick yourself up when you are faced with almost impossible odds and seemingly unmovable road blocks. I have faced many of these trials and I’m still young so I’m bound to face more as I progress. The word resilient means quite a bit to me because its made up of all the things that we are taught to be shame full of and remove from ourselves. to be resilient you must be all of these “taboo” things; you must be naive, delusional, optimistic, and hopeful even when it doesn’t make sense to be. I get my resilience from the desire to make a change with the gifts I have been endowed with. I want to be able to touch people through my work and through example. Resilience coupled with will and persistence is an unstoppable trifecta because when met with obstacles, you see only opportunity. I try to ensure that I allow myself to believe in the end result of my efforts and not get caught in the temporary difficulties in front of me. I am resilient because I truly believe without a doubt that I will accomplish what I set out to, so how could I not remain persistent?

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I am Malek Azrael, and I am a singer, songwriter, musician, producer, audio engineer and lead singer of The Vibez. Our band was officially formed in 2021 during the finish of my first project ‘WAVEZ’. We are an indie RnB and Rock band. We all met in college at Kansas City Kansas Community College, all being audio engineering majors. We have the opportunity to play with and amongst many amazing and accredited artist and have played at various venues and events. We have opened for D Smoke and Making Movies. We have played with Mike Dillon, Patti Austin, and Making Movies.
I am so excited about our growth over the past couple of years, and I am so excited to talk about whats happening now and what’s on the horizon! Our latest release ‘CRISIS?’ has been receiving amazing feedback and engagement and with every release this year we have been seeing that our awesome supporters like the direction we are going in. We are expecting to release an EP quite soon and have some awesome shows lined up for this year. On September 18th we will be joining The Whips and Friendly Thieves for a rooftop performance at Cross Road Hotels’ ‘Percheron’.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Since beginning my journey, I have found there are 3 important qualities to maintain: trust yourself first, be okay with disagreeing with the room and not being liked by everyone, don’t be afraid of failure and laugh at you mistakes and learn.
There are so many different opinions and critiques and some are not all right and some are not all wrong but you must take it all with a grain of salt and use your trusted discernment. When in role of leadership, there is no way to please everyone on your team especially as the team grows and that’s okay! You must be able to disagree in love and allow those who feel that they can not continue on this journey to find their creative or business ventures elsewhere. protect your vision, seek counsel cautiously, and be inspired even when those around you don’t reflect that same energy back. We learn from our mistakes and a mistake doesn’t mean it’s the end at all so be okay with trying over and over, getting better with each mistake and failure like chipping away at stone.

Alright, so before we go we want to ask you to take a moment to reflect and share what you think you would do if you somehow knew you only had a decade of life left?

My current challenge in this stage of my journey, is brand awareness and funding. I would like to find collaborators and investors. Finding a way to build our audience and create more music of quality production is of huge importance . We want to increase our overall ticket sales, brand awareness and engagement, and maximize our revenue to ensure the growth of our team.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: MALEKAZRAELVIBEZ
• Facebook: MALEK AZRAEL
• Youtube: MALEK AZRAEL
• Soundcloud: MALEK AZRAEL

Image Credits

DALLAS WAAGE
ANTHONY MIXON
ELLE SIEGEL