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New York-bred R&B vocalist Yaya Bey conjures a comprehensive self-portrait on her new studio album, Ten Fold, out May 10th via Big Dada. Over rapturous production from Corey Fonville of jazz group Butcher Brown, Karriem Riggins, Jay Daniel, Exaktly and Boston Chery, Yaya delivers a free-spoken masterpiece that documents a year punctuated by grief and loss, life-altering milestones and everything in between.
Ten Fold builds on the buzz Yaya generated with her powerful 2022 album Remember Your North Star, and its subsequent 2023 EP Exodus the North Star. Speaking on the approach to this album in comparison, Yaya says, “I usually try to have this whole thematic thing when I go into albums. But this album I just made as life was happening.”
Working within that kind of open-ended creative rhythm allowed Yaya to enrich the album with moments that convey all of the endeavors, emotions and experiences that inform her work. She’s lived life as a poet, a street medic at protests and founded a mutual aid organization called Sanaa, an art curator (PG African American Museum), and a mixed media artist herself with a residency at Brooklyn’s Mocada Museum and creating the cover art for past projects (“keisha,” “september 13th,” The Things I Can’t Take With Me EP and more). The album ties a thread between these varying facets of Yaya’s identity to present a wholehearted portrait of who she is and carves out spaces for her to speak on the world as she sees it.
