Can a dark night of the soul be fun? keiyaA thinks so. The producer and singer’s second album is a freewheeling journey through clubs, bedrooms, and panic that’s as cheeky and propulsive as it is heavy. Where her debut Forever, Ya Girl was affirmational and atmospheric, healing incense for working folks trying to get by, Hooke’s Law is an accelerant. Over staggering tracks overrun with rhythms, melodies, and voices, keiyaA hurtles through the abyss and dares you to keep up. She wants to take up space, to eat her landlord, to be chewed like pastrami on rye by a lover who follows her hips and the latest headlines. These are rider anthems for after the crashout.
The album title references a law of classical physics that describes how certain objects survive the imposition of force. When a coil is stretched, for instance, it can shift back without losing shape. keiyaA sees that elasticity in her battles with depression and loss, and dedicates the album to describing the feeling of being constantly squeezed and prodded by the world. As she put it in an interview, Hooke’s law helped her realize “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.”
Embracing that ethos, she prioritizes tension, narrating struggles with love and mental health in the nervous heat of real time. The unruly arrangements flow freely from drunken R&B to racing breakbeats to mellow IDM. Sound effects and warped samples abound: explosions, shattering glass, the iconic Lex Luger riser, clips of poems by Jayne Cortez and Pat Parker, and a flip of Jadakiss’ “U Make U Wanna.” The flux highlights her playfulness as a songwriter; you can feel her chuckling to herself when she begins a confessional about being frustratingly horny with a clip of Gucci Mane’s slut-shaming “Thirsty.” Through it all, keiyaA shows off a widened repertoire of scats and harmonies, often using Auto-Tune to stretch her cool melodies into tumbling streams of consciousness. It’s as if she’s cranked up the volume of the monologues from her past music.
The intensity fits keiyaA’s questioning writing. Sometimes she’s steely. “I dare a bitch to say sumn,” she says over martial drums and soft pads on “break it.” On “this time,” a team-up with rapper and Yaya Bey collaborator RahRah Gabor, she dismisses a lover like an irate boss: “Pack your shit up and get up out my sight.” Even when she’s on the dancefloor, she’s scanning for chins to check: “I didn’t come to dance, I came to fight/Burn the bridges, don’t make it right,” she sings over hectic jungle breaks on “fire sign oath.” But a moment later, she restrains herself: “Lucky for you I’m not the old me/I would’ve burned this shit down comfortably.” The deescalation doesn’t negate the threat; it complicates it. Why is she wound so tightly?
The answer varies as much as the shifting music. keiyaA “claims the pain” on the drumless and airy “stupid prizes,” but the realization is double-edged. “I’m a queen of the night/It’s when I see the brightest lights in my eyes,” she laments over a shimmering orchestral sample, cozy in darkness. But on “get close 2 me,” which opens with a sample of Amiri Baraka’s sardonic poem “Dope,” keiyaA wonders if she’s being a wee bit over the top. “Do I wanna die or am I just hungry?” she quips. The skittering drums up the sense that even her despairing mind is active.
To find relief from anxiety and the world, she often turns to romance. It hits the spot on the silky “motions,” a buttery ode to a fling that lets her cut loose. She feels so free she follows the song with an a capella reprise filled with hums and laughs. But at other points, love produces more ambivalence. When she tells a lover to give her space on the twitchy “be quiet!!!” she finds solitude can be stifling too: “I know my muted cries wanna get out my mind, they’re bound and tied up/Free me from my own reclusive nature,” she pleads to the same person she just silenced.
Two-part highlight “think about it/what u think?” probes another silence as keiyaA woozily disrupts a pending hookup to find out who exactly this person she’s flirting with is. “So wassup? Is you finna confess or what?/I won’t fight it, we can head down to the cut but/First, I’m tryna just get real studious/Then it’s head down, booty up,” she sings with pitch-corrected swagger. The song pokes fun at sapiosexuality and takes it seriously. She brings that same mix of confidence and curiosity to “lateeee,” where another part of the Baraka poem opens a series of stuttering come-ons and expressions of gratitude. “I’m blessed to conspire another day,” keiyaA repeats over crisp drums and spacey synths.
That sense of conspiracy, of moving forward despite fatigue and rising rents and heartbreak, fuels the album. Love is fickle, but cunning is bottomless, and keiyaA’s off-kilter collages cut paths through the hellscape and her doubts. She doesn’t find resolution or outright victory, nor does she seek them. She just moves, counting blessings, shaking ass, and asking the questions that will get her and her fam through the night.
