Odes to F-ckboys, Celebrations of Carnival and a Lot More: Yola Breaks Down Her New EP
British singer Yola breaks down her excellent new EP, 'My Way,' which includes odes to fuckboys, celebrations of Carnival and more
The past few years have been freeing for Yola. The genre-spanning British singer left Nashville, moved to the New York area (and started dating), earned her first role on Broadway (as Persephone in Hadestown), and began work on the next phase of her musical career. That era of Yolanda Quartey is now here with My Way (out today), a five-track mix of dance music and Eighties pop-R&B that marks a gentle but determined departure from her prior two albums: More Janet Jackson than Dolly Parton.Â
The collection contains everything from odes to fuckboys to diss tracks to celebrations of Carnival. Its title speaks to the increased autonomy Yola feels sheâs been able to carve out for herself; she co-wrote and co-produced My Way, drawing on her years of behind-the-board producer chops. âA big part of this new era, and this new art, is finally having the bargaining position,â she says. âBeing in the right space and knowing enough people in the right space, and freedom, finally, to go, âOK, I can now pick my environment, as I choose.â One of the most exciting things about this new era is this is me being able to do me, and Iâve not really been entirely free to do me.â
Her last album, 2021âs Stand for Myself, was, she now says, a different story. Produced by Dan Auerbach for his Easy Eye Sound label, the record represented yet another moment, in a career full of them, of Yola feeling creatively stifled, as though her full range of artistry â as a singer, arranger, producer, and instrumentalist â was sidelined. She fought to get her preferred musicians on the record, fought to have the track âDancing Away in Tearsâ released as a single (a fight she lost), and fought to insert herself more into the recording process, to little avail. The experience was one of several that influenced the title track on My Way: âYou wanted control,â she sings, âbut this is misery.â
âItâs cookie-cutter bullshit, is all it is,â she says of the old-fashioned label model of Easy Eye Sound, with its in-house songwriters and musicians. âItâs what they did in the old days: People have no agency. That was something that was celebrated, so I can see how people hold that up as a way to operate. But itâs also a waste of my skill.â
Yola recently walked Rolling Stone through the five songs on her new EP.
âFuture Enemiesâ
The song: This pulsing dance-rocker finds Yola casting off negative forces in her life.
Yola says: Its first inspiration came from dating, those moments where you meet somebody and youâre like, âOh, no. I know how to be charming, I know how to charm people. But Iâve noticed, in this moment of charming, that if you figure out who I am as a person, you know that Iâm charming you. It isnât that we get on. This has been pure duping.â That was something you encounter quite a lot when dating. Everyone you meet isnât your person. I realized I had some people in my circles who were really shit friends. It was like they didnât give a crap whether you lived or died. They said they did, but their actions didnât show that.
If youâre very confident in your skills, like I am, some people could find that mad threatening. The need to subjugate or put you in a beta role becomes overwhelming. That started showing in my social life. I noticed that one of the central tenets of âFuture Enemiesâ was just this opportunity to avoid making enemies that were completely unnecessarily made. Somehow you need to be like Homer [Simpson] backing into the hedge. Thatâs freaking me. You just need to disappear.Â
Itâs been one of the central tenets to my life: Other people putting me on, walking me around their dreams. It wasnât just musical collaborators. It was people I did business with, friends, every part of my life. People were finding something that was useful in me and then going, âIâm going to use that to get what I want out of life, and Iâm going to leave her in the dust.â
âTemporaryâ
The song: Leaning into her high register, Yola whispers and sings this midtempo dance-funk âode to fuckboys,â anchored by a strutting bass line from Divinity Roxx.
Yola says: I was probably out on a date with somebody who was the genre of person I like to call âhot and horrible.â Theyâre a smokeshow, but theyâre a dreadful human being. When youâre dating a lot, itâs fucking exhausting. I donât know if youâve seen these streets, but theyâre ratchet as fuck. People are trying to demonstrate theyâre not a complete fucking mess, so they do the best they can on their profile, and they rock up, and theyâre a mess. Hetero men donât really know how to look after themselves in the best of times. The ones that do often are hot and horrible.Â
But you know what? They do have a role. You canât date seriously all the time and not get burned out, so you need someone who isnât serious at all. The song is really an ode to fuckboys. Part of what they get off on is hoodwinking you into believing youâre the one. When youâre exhausted, they step into the frame and make sure you donât realize a real connection with your horndom. It was probably in 2023, in New York in the summer, Iâd been on a date with someone. It mightâve been inspired by a couple of people, now that I think about it, a few vapid cats. Just after the pandemic I definitely met a few cats down in Long Island who were like this. Motherfucking Surf Lodge. Some years later, I started dating seriously, and it made me think back to that era.Â
âSymphonyâ
The song: This surging funk-rocker captures the thrill and rush love of new love: âPlay my heartstrings with both your hands.â
Yola says: I was starting to feel like I was getting closer to what my person would be like. The U.K. never had my person: I knew it from my jump. The whole ethos and functionality just runs antithetical to my existence. He was never ever going to be there. I arrived in Nashville and was like, âProbably not.â I didnât date in Nashville. I was there full time for four years. Call it hashtag âtoo long.â Iâve been really down on Nashville. The way I operate my life wasnât compatible with the city. The infrastructure of Nashville was really dope to me: the radio stations, the press, venues. Thatâs why I stayed so long. But the makeup of the city, the culture, if you will, wasnât exactly a match. Maybe I was too far from home. Even from people from varying backgrounds, the assumption that centering witness was what the definition of normality was.Â
That isnât the case in New York at all. England has a lot of white-centering. But that was the opposite of what I was looking for when I came to America. I wanted to find places that centered in more diverse ways. Not just had diverse faces that centered all identically, but had diverse ways of centering. Thatâs way more interesting to me.Â
So when I started living between New York and Nashville, I started dating in earnest like it was a full-time job: Five days a week. I set out a schedule. I was dead serious. I was on a couple apps, mostly ones that centered around dating Black people. Iâve been in England. I grew up in a village. Iâve been literally drowning in white people. Iâm not a sexual racist. I went out of my way to make sure my va-jay-jay was not biased. Some people are. When âSymphonyâ started happening, I started noticing that even though it wasnât the person [I was dating], some things were being brought out in me that were really positive. Something these people demonstrated was really positive. That helped me incrementally find my person, and then I found my person. But I wrote the song before I found my person.Â
âMy Wayâ
The song: Yola channels her best Michael Jackson impression on this fiery, anthemic kiss off to a stifling foe.
Yola says: I like a diss track. This song is about when youâre trapped and you canât just evaporate because you have to be in this space. Itâs about the levels of which I had to go through, mind gaming, after someone tried to mind game me. This song is really about how I really tried with someone: âIâm interested in you as a person and how you operate. Letâs be collaborative. But you just canât seem to not want to invoke the mammy paradigm, which is the plus-size Black woman who serves you at the sacrificing of herself.âÂ
And this isnât just one person. This is a genre that would find me all the fucking time. But in this particular situation, the line âYouâll get what you wantâ is because youâre either more powerful than me. The kind of people who can play power games over you are rich people, older people, white guys, white ladies playing the victim, skinny people playing the victim. People donât realize anti-fatness is anti-Blackness. I think fat phobia is an intersection people donât give any respect to, but itâs in every single culture, as much as colorism is. As much as âMy Wayâ was about work, it also reflected into the personal space. âMy Wayâ is the decentering of everyone elseâs narrative from my narrative. âMy Wayâ equals agency, me being able to have a say over my own life, for the first time, at age 40.Â
âReadyâ
The song:Â Howard Artisâ charging drumbeat provides the heartbeat for this bouncy funk-pop tune that has layers of meaning but, on its surface, is a party-friendly, feel-good ode to living in the moment.
Yola says: If I played you âReadyâ and then I said, âAn African-Caribbean person was involved in the making of this song,â youâd be profoundly unsurprised. And thatâs the point. Itâs about [the passenger ship HMT Empire] Windrush, and itâs from the point of view of an African-Caribbean Brit. The lens that it comes through sonically are a lot of the things that were big in the U.K. when I was growing up, as much as Caribbean and African influence. Youâll hear M.J. influences. Thereâs definitely Lionel Ritchie. Thereâs Gloria Estefan.Â
Itâs supposed to be a song that would blow up big at Carnival. Itâs one of the most important parts of feeling sane as a Black person in the U.K.: Youâre going to walk down the street, someoneâs going to have a machete and green coconut stand, and theyâre going to slice off the coconut, open the flesh off the top, and pour in a little bit of alcohol and make you a piĂąa colada. On the other side of the street is going to be the jerk-chicken barrels. Youâre walking down towards whichever sound system you want, and you feel you have some communion with your Caribbean life that you missed out on having. The song is supposed to evoke that sense of celebration. Â
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