Ibeyi introduce the title track off their fourth album with a disclaimer: “I don’t make spells anymore,” says Lisa-Kaindé Diaz. “Now, I make offerings,” adds Naomi, her twin sister. They attribute the shift to an apparition of Yemayá, the mother orisha of oceans and rivers, to Lisa-Kaindé. “Only offerings now,” the deity told her. In one sense, it’s a protective reaction to spells that don’t bear fruit. But it’s also a despojo—a cleansing act that finds freedom in letting go of the control we’re wired to cling to.
The transition is right there in the titles of their albums: 2022’s Spell 31, a record thick with spiritual invocations from across history and geography, was named after an arcane entry in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. A few things stay the same on Offering: The twins sing in English, Spanish, French, and Yoruba, in phrases short in meter, with a reverence for the spiritual and their ancestors. The narratives allude to heartbreak, motherhood, and the memory of loved ones like their father, Buena Vista Social Club conguero Miguel “Angá” Diaz, and their sister, Yanira Diaz. But Offering invites new collaborators into their process, like Haitian-Guyanese producer Michaël Brun and Cuban percussionist Pedrito Martinez. The sisters take control in one crucial way: It’s the first album the sisters have self-released on their new eponymous label after their first three on London’s talent-breaking XL Recordings.
Musically, Ibeyi flow through a range of intensities. They open by invoking Olokún, whose domain is the deepest part of the sea; their words emerge from a base of breathy vocalizations heavily processed, metabolizing the orisha’s anger and hurt. On “Aset,” Cuban percussionist (and Santero) Pedrito Martinez plays the batá, whose many polyrhythmic textures are the sonic foundation of Lucumí and Afro-Cuban folkloric spirituality. They build in intensity alongside a chorus of “ay, amor,” transmuting the Egyptian myth of Isis into an unmistakably Cuban interpretation. On “Moshpit,” a synthesized clanging like a hot pipe and the pulled-apart batá underpin the distorted refrain, “I am the moshpit,” a chaotic affirmation of internal contradictions and irresolution. Amid a host of synthetic textures, the batá grounds the record in its spiritual reference; only the twins’ perspective changes. Elsewhere, as on “La tendresse d’un mot,” they return to a reverent unison, their voices only breaking into harmony when most resonant. On “The Process,” the image of a machete held to the sky is sung against a sepulchral vocalization, illustrating the twins’ promise, “I’ll be brave/I won’t numb the process.”
The visual language of the album grounds the spiritual core of the record in Cuba—not Cuba, as envisioned by the foreign gaze or in diaspora, but Cuba, the island and its water, where movement is intrinsic to its border. In the video for “Aset,” people dance in an apartment in Havana’s Vedado neighborhood; outside the door, women sweep water down the brutalist hallway of Edificio Girón, framed by the sea.
In Western dialogue, Cuba is often discussed in terms of stagnance. Or, alternately, of pressure building to a boiling point. Even well-meaning attention to the increasing difficulties of daily life on the island can take on overtones of an NGO white paper. Historian Ada Ferrer speaks about the trap of words like “unsustainable” amid the U.S.’s increasingly severe economic sanctions: “We know from history that collapse doesn’t just happen and then something disappears,” she recently cautioned. “Things can keep getting worse. No matter how bad they are, they can still keep getting worse.” There is no foregone answer for the people targeted by geopolitical escalation. Life moves anyway, in every direction.
And while the record’s stiller moments are perfectly lovely, it’s this movement that propels the record to its emotional apex: the three-song stretch of “Offerings,” “Baba,” and “I Know You Loved Me.” “Offerings” was filmed at the Malecón in Havana; Naomi cuts Lisa-Kaindé’s hair, and she offers it to the sea. It’s a sanguine depiction of melancholy lyrics: “I let this sadness/Pierce through my heart,” Lisa-Kaindé sings. “I heard its sword fell/And touch the ground.” Underwater, her hair transforms into a jellyfish, moving in submission with its surroundings. If change is constant, like waves crash against the same wall, the refrain—“I guess my heart is an offering”—is an intention to move with, and not against, it.
“Baba” matches the sisters’ prayer to the self—“One thing is for sure/I’m who I was looking for”—with Naomi’s clave-driven supplication in Yoruba to Baba Eleggua. The effect of this submission of will seems to pull a driving bassline into sentience. Naomi’s chant to the father of fate powerfully realigns the focus on percussion, their father’s gift. On “I Know You Loved Me,” the sisters sing slightly out of sync with a bubbling bassline on the verses that look back on calling or not calling a dynamic love before locking back into acceptance of the larger picture. Love, like movement, is a force without a default intention of good or evil. The momentum picks up around a falling melody that acknowledges unreconciled truths. “This is just the river/This is not the sea,” the sisters sing. “I want more than this river/I know you loved me.”
If the spells-versus-offerings thesis comes across as cautious, the sisters correct course by the album’s close. The production on Ibeyi’s earliest singles was cleanly rendered, to the point of otherworldliness. On Offering, their voices move within the music, in total submission to their circumstances. “We can’t manifest for shit,” they confess in unison on “Lucky.” Dispersion is a condition of diaspora, but this surrender of the past and of control isn’t necessarily a sad one. They call it lucky. “I’m excited for what is coming,” they echo to each other.
