Yaya Bey has been wrestling with grief for a minute. Following the death of her father, Grand Daddy I.U. of the hip-hop collective Juice Crew, Bey penned a collection of songs that paid tribute to his memory on 2024’s Ten Fold. On last year’s do it afraid, that grief wasn’t an explicit feature so much as an implicit undertone. Beneath the joyous jazz and relaxed aural atmosphere was an internalized anguish. As Bey explains in press materials, she found herself in a Miami hotel room during the release week of do it afraid, crying and alone. She’d realized there was “no place for that grief to exist that would not become a spectacle.” Such is the plight Bey explores on Fidelity.
Billed as a counterpart to do it afraid, Fidelity confronts a different strain of grief than its predecessors. It’s metatextual in the sense that, rather than mourning any one specific person, Fidelity mourns the act of grief itself: the privilege of allowing yourself a private respite when you’re a musician in the public eye. This is a suite of R&B, jazz, and reggae tunes for Bey to wax poetic on our relatively short lives and the transient nature of this mortal coil. She frames that idea through love songs that you come to realize aren’t always directed at a particular paramour but at the fleeting moments shared with that person.
On “Higher,” Bey rides a locked-in soul groove to tell her lover, while she still can, how much they mean to her. “Nothing’s ever here to stay / Everything just fades away / But love, come on baby, won’t you take it? / This promise, no, I won’t ever break it,” she coos, making an offer for romance before the time runs out. She continues that yearning on “Dream Girl (Lexapro Mix)” when she tries to get a straight answer out of her lover. “How much time you need from me? / What you need from me? / ‘Cause I only got / This one life to live,” she sings, harmonizing with herself over cloudy guitars and a steady, clicking drum beat.
“Dream Girl (Lexapro Mix)” is one of two songs that’s a direct sequel to a track from do it afraid; there’s also “The Towns (bella noches pt. 2),” in which the refrain of “rent’s too high, wages too low” returns, this time wrapped in gauzier textures that play like a sulfurous sibling to the insistent, four-on-the-floor stomp and rap flows on “bella noches pt. 1.” For the most part, Fidelity trades in its precursor’s defined, tactile production for feathery flourishes. The dreamlike vocal harmonies from Samantha G. and Anastasia Antoinette on the brief introduction “Me and Mine” appropriately set the tenor, which guides the direction of Bey’s musings on the ephemeral. “The Great Migration” maintains the illusory feel but expands the instrumental palette with distant trumpet from Andrew Velez and light djembe from Talu Green.
Still, there are moments of physicality that break the somnambulant spell. The syncopated drums on “Forty Days” summon the in-the-pocket rhythm section of the Soulquarians. She taps frequent collaborator Exaktly for punchy production on “Simp Daddy Line Dance,” which interpolates “Cha-Cha Slide” to describe the evasive patterns of a deadbeat dude: “I bet you cha cha like left foot / Yeah right foot left stomp / I bet you’d be gone at the end of the month.” Even on an album mostly centered on weighty subject matter, Bey still finds ways to inject some humor and have fun with it.
Her vision comes together at its best on “Blue.” The bass and drums hold on to each other like slow dancers in a tight embrace, and Justine Lee Hopper’s flute, tranquil and trilling, needles its way through the pulse. But Bey’s mesmerizing voice is the element that rises above all else. “Say what you mean, mean what you say / It’s a new day,” she sings in her silky timbre. This is where Fidelity truly shines: when the band sits in the pocket, when the sundry sonic details unite themselves into a billowy blend, and when Bey’s voice emerges like a light in thick fog. Life is far too short, she tells us, to not lay it all out there. [drink sum wtr]
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, NME, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
