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Remember Your North Star, the resplendent new album from the Brooklyn singer-songwriter Yaya Bey, scenes of heartache and joy are both glimpsed through a prismatic lens. Bey’s blend of R&B, soul, and jazz is bound together by the specificity of her lyrics, which recount conversational stories of sex and breakups and lend vivid color to her music. Following her breakthrough Madison Tapes LP and introspective The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP, Bey has crystallized her sound into one of the most dazzling albums of the year. The multifaceted music of Remember Your North Star lingers with somatic force, depicting the collision of thoughts, troubles, and desires of a Black woman searching for connection. It’s a powerful statement of purpose that resists easy answers, instead swirling through Bey’s mind as she looks for them herself. R&B Upstart Yaya Bey Wants More for Black Women Bey has described Remember Your North Star as a “thesis,” a way to center Black womanhood while working through the misogynoir that occurs in their romantic relationships. “I saw a tweet that said, ‘Black women have never seen healthy love or have been loved in a healthy way,’” she said in a statement. “That’s a deep wound for us. Then I started to think about our responses to that as Black women.” In practice, those ideas manifest in expressionistic songs largely produced by Bey herself that consider the traumas inflicted by misogyny, often by drawing on her own experiences of depression and familial turmoil. Moving through jazz, R&B, soul, and reggae with a dancer’s careful sense of balance, Remember Your North Star’s themes are rooted in the desire to be loved and wanted, with rich, detailed traces of autobiography folded in throughout. Bey has worked within ideological frameworks before—2016’s The Many Alter-Egos of Trill’eta Brown explored similar ideas, inspired partially by Audre Lorde’s concept of biomythography, a style that merges history, biography, and myth. Remember Your North Star refines that conscientiousness into a sharpened blade. “I am the daughter of a girl/Who could go missing/For seven years/Thirty-one years/And the world wouldn’t skip a beat,” she opens in a scratchy vocal filter on the spoken-word interlude “i’m certain she’s there,” an ode to her mother, landing an instant gut punch on generational trauma. Bey also revisits the soul-crushing grind of working a nine-to-five that she scrutinized on Madison Tapes, picking apart capitalism’s sway over her circumstances. “Ain’t nobody tell me it’d be like this,” she sings in a lilting flow on the mellow “nobody knows,” going on to pin down a recognizable frame of mind for millennials across the country: “I done worked my whole life and I still ain’t rich.” Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.