On her exceptional 2022 album Keep in mind Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a glowing addendum and a joyous new extension of her biomythic strategy to soundtracking Black Caribbean womanhood. On Exodus, Bey exchanges rhythm and blues with riddims and grooves and stretches her limbs throughout reggae, mambo, gospel, home, and jazz. It’s a sunlit, stained-glass depiction of self-love in the important thing of Jamaica, Queens.
Throughout six tracks, Bey names her want for unhurried love and affirmation. In opposition to the breezy reggae of the title observe, she singjays “take me the place the love is free” over fuzzy saxophone and swaying percussion. Toasting to the phrase “free,” she emphasizes her value and sings of a tenderness that matches her sturdy, assured fly. “On the pisces moon” is one other stripped-down reggae tune, prefaced this time with fluttering electrical guitar plucks. “However I would like extra,” she repeats, her lingering supply conjuring a balmy sense of longing.
Her sunny outlook fades on “munerah,” a metallic, bare-bones mambo for one which explores the wrestle to let go of previous narratives. Bey breathlessly oscillates between singing and rapping about her want to keep up solitude however finds no decision. “Ascendent (mom fxcker),” a lo-fi home hotbox produced by D.C. beatmaker Exaktly, restores her peace. Atop a wash of digital pulses, she flexes her religion in herself, singing, “Sunshine received’t final all of my days, however I’ll be sunshine all of my days” with an audible grin. The swelling synths and delicate grooves evoke a way of internal hope, a promise to remain blessed, free, and favored.
On “when saturn returns,” Bey leans on the idea of astrological rebirth to rejoice in having reached a brand new stage of private evolution. Led by lustrous piano strokes, this organ ballad travels throughout time: a gospel choir pirouettes right into a misty home beat produced by collaborator Nativesun. That is the fountain from which Yaya Bey drinks, drawing from an considerable supply of diasporic teachings and traditions with out overworking the sound. She makes use of area and darkness, of her flaws and her fierceness, experimenting with the sounds of her childhood to forge her ever-expanding language of affection. Generally, that’s the one approach to get free.
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