Dropping somebody near you’ll be able to really feel like a rupture in time. How can the solar proceed to rise? How can the world preserve transferring? The disorientation of being essentially altered in grief motivates Yaya Bey’s transcendent new album, Ten Fold. “My nigga left the world and the world ain’t cease,” she quietly raps on “yvette’s cooking present.” The Queens-raised artist recorded the album within the yr following the loss of life of her father, Ayub Bey—the emcee and producer Grand Daddy I.U., who was a member of the pioneering hip-hop collective Juice Crew and a towering determine in Bey’s life. Funeral prices compelled her to maintain working and over the course of a yr, she made music with none agency plans. The outcomes, whittled right down to 16 tracks, are snapshots of an artist transferring via loss as she navigates monetary and emotional precarity and the vicissitudes of romance. It’s a finely detailed portrait of grief that additionally celebrates the fullness of life.
The ripples of Yaya Bey’s day-to-day are small, however in her delicate fingers, they’re strikingly resonant. Ten Fold not often dwells on the previous, selecting as an alternative to mark the passage of time by cataloging the sentiments that sprouted alongside the best way—unhappiness, defiance, pleasure, frustration, pleasure, love. Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are underneath three minutes) permit Bey to be as nimble as ever. After asserting the grief that “weighs heavy” on her, she briskly wipes her tears to rejoice her blooming potential on the pocket-disco music “chrysanthemums.” She finds “fly shit” on the thrift retailer on “east coast mami” to mission the arrogance wanted to make energy strikes. Relationships fizzle and develop; hire stays too rattling excessive. Collectively, the album feels like a Black girl simply attempting to get by.
In line with her 2022 breakout album, Bear in mind Your North Star, Bey pulls from the hotter colours of a Black musical palette—Soulquarians-style neo-soul, upbeat funk, home, and increase bap. The manufacturing, assisted by Corey Fonville of the genre-melding jazz-hop band Butcher Brown, feels cozy and self-soothing. She faucets into familiarity, but resists complacency. The album opens with the simmering melancholy of “crying via my tooth,” which like its non secular ancestor “Didn’t Cha Know,” carries a world of feeling within the easiest of phrases. The place songs like “no one is aware of” on North Star described vivid characters and scenes, Ten Fold’s tales are summary, unfolding like an prolonged inside monologue. The spare home beat of “sir princess unhealthy bitch” is demo-like, and its round chorus (“The gorgeous factor about me/Is each little lovely factor/Is on its method to me”) sounds just like the sort of made-up music you sing to maintain your self afloat. Directing the affirmations inward permits Bey to skillfully sidestep platitudes: emotions come up spontaneously and inconstantly from all throughout the emotional spectrum. Even the songs explicitly about different individuals really feel insular, just like the blooming romance of “gradual dancing within the kitchen.” The sunny reggae reduce has the gossamer high quality of a daydream or a gaze directed towards a lover.
