Following the one-two punch of artistic (and popular) breakthroughs in 2022’s Remember Your North Star and 2024’s Ten Fold, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Yaya Bey might take some time off, to both relish the moment and, moreover, recharge. That latter album, after all, revolved around the death of her father (underrated New York golden age MC Grand Daddy I.U., mind you), presenting a rather novel take on the “grief album” by being far less about the loss itself, and much more about the mess of emotions that comes with every other experience one deals with, day to day, during a period of grief.
Well, to the contrary, Bey has dashed back to stage just over a year later. She’s come out swinging, too, with do it afraid bluntly stating its mission statement in the album’s opening seconds.
While it’s certainly beaming in from a different angle, Bey remains dedicated to soul searching, and not in the “lite” sense of the expression: as ever, her music deals with trudging towards her deepest innerbeing, seeking to understand just why we are the way that we are, why we do the things we do. do it afraid is interested in the catharsis that comes along with facing your fears, and, of course, the stumbling blocks and inner-weakness one deals with in doing so. By linking up wuth the most expansive list of collaborators she’s tapped to date (BADBADNOTGOOD, Exaktly and Butcher Brown are among the producers), it also finds her weaving through arguably the most layered, fine musical backdrops she’s yet presented.
If Ten Fold had a diaristic quality, snapshots of days mixed between self-love, grief, and crashing out just a tad, do it afraid tends to function more as a singular work, less interested in bite-sized jams and standouts than a cohesive, blissfully slow lull. The light tap of “raisins” can feel like droplets of rain, which bleeds into the glacial, reggae-tinged “spin cycle”: each track feels interwoven into the experience of Bey entering, wide-eyed into the grace she’s finally allowing herself.
Her words often possess a duality: “spin cycle”, for example, finds her reveling in bliss – “I’ve never known a love like this” – all while delving in a certain fatalistic realism: “and I never will again”. Before the blow can set in, she whisks the listener away into the brief disco throb of “dream girl”. As ever, she’s an intuitive expert at knowing just when to let us in – and just when to pull away. She never dwells on one thought too long, and hence, never do we, always swept off in the next wave of exploratory, playful sound.
It’s towards the album’s middle that it (fittingly) reaches its emotional centerpiece, with “breakthrough” finding Bey entirely owning her desires and self-assurance, “a surrender” drifting in a battle between pride and fear, and “in a circle” feeling inspired by Janet Jackson circa The Velvet Rope as she “throws that ass around”. As with many of Bey’s best songs, it’s a delightfully catchy ode to doing as one pleases. The next song slides into her reveling in the fact that everyone in the club is “on her body now”. That’s the mission statement, after all: go ahead, take what you want, no matter how much it frightens you, no matter what some lame might say or think. Would you rather be sitting at home, alone, mixing a double cocktail for one, wishing you had? Yaya Bey knows her answer.
