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Yaya bey

New York-bred R&B vocalist Yaya Bey conjures a comprehensive self-portrait on her new studio album, Ten Fold. Where her previous works were earnest and mindful, Yaya’s new LP is definitive, harkening back to aspects of her past while examining the future of the world that surrounds her with a stream-of-conscious intentionality. Over rapturous production from Corey Fonville of jazz group Butcher Brown, Karriem Riggins, Jay Daniel, Exaktly and Boston Chery, Yaya delivers a free-spoken masterpiece that speaks to the intricacies of persevering through a year punctuated by grief and loss, life-altering milestones and everything in between.

Nine months after releasing her powerful 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya returned with Exodus the North Star, primed to evolve through the tumult. “I usually try to have this whole thematic thing when I go into albums. But this album I just made as life was happening,” she says.

Working within that kind of open-ended creative rhythm allowed Yaya to enrich the album with moments that convey all of the endeavors, emotions and experiences that inform her work in music and beyond. She’s lived life as a poet, a street medic at protests and founded a mutual aid organization called Sanaa, an art curator (PG African American Museum), and a mixed media artist herself with a residency at Brooklyn’s Mocada Museum and creating the cover art for past projects (“keisha,” “september 13th,” The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP and more). The album ties a thread between these varying facets of Yaya’s identity to present a wholehearted portrait of who she is and carves out spaces for her to speak on the world as she sees it. On Ten Fold, she meditates on her inner being, falling in love, and in equal measure, commentates on the world and community around her, critiquing political conditions, like rising costs and the near-dystopian state of mankind.

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