On her remarkable 2022 album Remember Your North Star, Yaya Bey unearthed grief and heartache amid a slow-burning patchwork of hip-hop, neo-soul, and Afrobeats. The Brooklyn-based singer’s new EP, Exodus the North Star, is a sparkling addendum and a joyous new extension of her biomythic approach to soundtracking Black Caribbean womanhood. On Exodus, Bey exchanges rhythm and blues with riddims and grooves and stretches her limbs across reggae, mambo, gospel, house, and jazz. It’s a sunlit, stained-glass depiction of self-love in the key of Jamaica, Queens.
Across six tracks, Bey names her desire for unhurried love and affirmation. Against the breezy reggae of the title track, she singjays “take me where the love is free” over fuzzy saxophone and swaying percussion. Toasting to the word “free,” she emphasizes her worth and sings of a tenderness that matches her sturdy, assured fly. “On the pisces moon” is another stripped-down reggae tune, prefaced this time with fluttering electric guitar plucks. “But I want more,” she repeats, her lingering delivery conjuring a balmy sense of longing.
Her sunny outlook fades on “munerah,” a metallic, bare-bones mambo for one that explores the struggle to let go of old narratives. Bey breathlessly oscillates between singing and rapping about her desire to maintain solitude but finds no resolution. “Ascendent (mother fxcker),” a lo-fi house hotbox produced by D.C. beatmaker Exaktly, restores her peace. Atop a wash of electronic pulses, she flexes her faith in herself, singing, “Sunshine won’t last all of my days, but I’ll be sunshine all of my days” with an audible grin. The swelling synths and subtle grooves evoke a sense of inner hope, a promise to stay blessed, free, and favored.
On “when saturn returns,” Bey leans on the concept of astrological rebirth to rejoice in having reached a new stage of personal evolution. Led by lustrous piano strokes, this organ ballad travels across time: a gospel choir pirouettes into a misty house beat co-produced with collaborator Nativesun. This is the fountain from which Yaya Bey drinks, drawing from an abundant source of diasporic teachings and traditions without overworking the sound. She makes use of space and darkness, of her flaws and her fierceness, experimenting with the sounds of her childhood to forge her ever-expanding language of love. Sometimes, that’s the only way to get free.
