do it afraid

“Suffering is promised to us all, but so is joy. You have to find peace in that duality,” says Yaya Bey, who commits to life’s delight — humor, love, the power of human movement and connection — even if she has to do it afraid. With her new album, which follows a run of critically acclaimed releases and marks her debut on art-forward indie label drink sum wtr, the Queens, New York singer-songwriter thrives across uplifting, effervescent material. A rejection of past narratives projected onto her, do it afraid finds Bey reclaiming her story with resolutely fun, full-hearted, and nuanced songs that pull from R&B, hip-hop, jazz, soul, and dance music, including the soca stylings of her family’s Bajan roots. do it afraid celebrates all sides of Yaya as part of a collective lifeforce that doesn’t subscribe to fear but to the moments that move us.

“I wrote this album from the most vulnerable parts of me, which contrary to what many people want to believe about me, is not my trauma but my desire to love, to feel joy...to be free. In this life, pain and loss are promised to us; it takes real courage to dance in the face of the inevitable. To savor the now and make it beautiful. I come from a people who are masters at this. Onlookers like to make a spectacle of us. Rob of us of our nuance. But the truth is we are brave, resilient and joyful. I made this album for us. May we continue to do it afraid.”

First, Yaya works through the raw emotions. In the tradition of her rap-led album openers, “wake up bitch” comes from a place inflamed. Over a fluttering piano loop, she deconstructs the contemporary hellscape, taking aim at widespread uncertainty, economic recession, and an exploitive industrial complex built on lies. She explains, “Anger for anger's sake isn’t productive, but sometimes you need that fire lit, like here are the things to be mad about.” As a self-identified working-class artist, Yaya maintains a healthy distrust of institutions at large and an unwavering belief in herself — she fronted the album’s recording budget without a label partner yet in place and manifested it as a 2025 release — and that fiery intentionality radiates in the intro and elsewhere across Yaya’s clever, confessional rap cadence. On “bella noches pt. 1” she decries low wages and rising rents; on “choice” she’s mad at god but chooses “to trust him anyway”; on “breakthrough” — a bumping, rattling, scorched-earth shuffle of keys and bass — she reminds folks to not take this magic for granted.

Flipping the script with intensity is key to Yaya’s craft, while do it afraid’s power also rests in its pleasures, the sonic embodiment of a smile and the counterpoint to the misconception that Yaya’s music is solely about overcoming hardship. After breaking out with Remember Your North Star in 2022 and the success of 2024’s transcendent Ten Fold, “I suddenly became like the face of Black struggle,” she says. “But if you know me in real life or been to one of my shows, you know I have a superb sense of humor. I'm funny. Because I'm black. Because we are funny. Because we are inherently joyful and actually being Black is a very f*cking fun experience…but people like to minimize us to one dimension.” From the softly percussive lover’s anthem “end of the world” to the vaporwave fever dream of “dream girl” to the big stepping, ‘throwin-that-ass-around’ club call “in a circle,” this music feels good.

“I just had to really go back to like, what do I know? What do I do to make myself feel good? I put music on in my house. I dance. I knew I needed to make dance music and I needed to make a nuanced album. There’s dance in my previous work, but I feel more confident in that space on this album.”

Perhaps the purest point on the carefree end of Yaya’s catalog is “merlot and grigio.” She details its origin, “I was traveling for shows a lot last year and was just thinking, I want a chance to go where people look like me. I would love to go play a show in Barbados. I gotta make some soca records.” She reached out to Bajan artist Father Philis, who dropped his ad-libs over a vibrant, hooky rhythmic bed produced by Yaya. “We're so excited about it; it's cool to bridge that gap, you know, throughout the diaspora, that Caribbean and American bridge. It’s a real soca record, like my aunt Wendy would play this.”

What keeps do it afraid cohesive is not just Yaya’s boundless voice — from high-velocity verses to tender close-ups (“no for real, wtf?”) and strummed codas (“a tiny thing that’s mine”) — but her world-building ear for arrangement. She welcomes a cast of co-producers, including BADBADNOTGOOD, Exaktly, and Virginia collective Butcher Brown. Reuniting with the latter yielded several tracks, including “raisins,” a jazz-inflected DJ Harrison production she cried the first time she heard. In this song, which serves as the anchoring sentiment of the album, Yaya understands the generational journey from her father’s bout with the music industry to her own: the pressure, the scrutiny, and the fear of failure. “I can’t run no more,” she delivers over drum taps, deeply in the groove of the moment, afraid yet unflinching and free: “So if I step out on faith / For heaven’s sake / Let it be everything I dreamed of.”