An indefatigable seeker of sounds, the Queens-based musician carries her mastery as a producer across genres—from reggae to jazz, from dance music to nu-soul and R&B.
With the exception of a two-year breather following the breakout of her bona fide debut album Remember Your North Star (2022), Yaya Bey has spent her time cementing her status as an indefatigable seeker, delivering roughly one project per year.
A voracious seeker of sounds (she is a producer), she is also in the academic sense: an activist, and well-versed in the social sciences. Two facets that feed off one another in an exemplary discography now enriched by a fourth album: Fidelity.
A Transcendence of Grief Through the Quest for Sound
Leaving largely behind rap (without entirely abandoning the influence of hip-hop culture—her father, Grand Daddy I.U., was a member of New York’s Juice Crew in the 1980s), this new sixteen-track collection picks up right where her third album, Do It Afraid (2025), left us.
If the latter sought to move beyond the overly restrictive image of the grieving woman — the previous one, Ten Fold (2024), being notably marked by the loss of her father — Fidelity returns to tackle it through the lens of instrumentalization and the staging of the suffering of Black artists.
In this sense, this stream-of-consciousness record continually searches within the repertoire of jazz, nu-soul, and R&B, but also reggae or American Black dance music, for answers to its existential questions.
Fidelity (Drink Sum Wtr). Released on April 17.
