Hooke’s Law

The Chicago-born singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and a record producer is like a coiled spring on this spacious yet claustrophobic follow-up to 2020’s brilliant Forever, Ya Girl

You might recognise the scene: a bedroom lit blue by screens, soundtracked by video game bleeps and the thumbed stutter of social media feeds, perforated by an occasional phone alarm. Dishevelled bedcovers mandatory, takeaway containers optional. It’s bed rot, baby!

“Internally null and void,” as keiyaA puts it on the last track of her new album, Hooke’s Law, was how the Chicago-born artist found herself after the critical hype subsided around her 2020 self-released debut Forever, Ya Girl, a work of DIY brilliance that tinkered with jazz, hiphop, R&B, and electronic music, leaving just the cold demand of the second album.

But the bed-ridden scrolling proved fruitful, when keiyaA encountered a tweet from writer Mandy Harris Williams: “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.” Williams was citing Hooke’s law, a physics concept I don’t feel confident explaining here, but one that puts depressive episodes in a poetic light: using your lowest depths as fuel to push up and out. It became the title of keiyaA’s new album.

At first, Hooke’s Law seems all downward spiral, no loaded spring. It’s sprawling, dense like an overloaded mind with layers and samples and looping thoughts. First track proper, ‘i h8 u’, features a bubbling melange of video game sounds and that jarring iPhone alarm. “Don’t beep my line expecting an immediate reply,” she warns on ‘be quiet!!!’. On ‘get close 2 me’, she strips off the album’s armour of autotune to admit with crystal diction that it “takes too much to keep it all together these days,” before wondering, “do I wanna die or am I just hungry?” (We’ve all been there.)

But the spring is very much loaded – with anger, horniness, and a lineage of similarly angry, similarly horny political and poetic figures that keiyaA calls upon. ‘Stupid prizes’ puts the pain of being marginalised to the classic American romantic sound of orchestral composer Percy Faith. Amiri Baraka pops up more than once, reading from his poem ‘Dope’, alongside Black queer poet Pat Parker reading from her poem ‘Let Me Come To You Naked’. “I’m tryna just get real studious / then it’s head down, booty up,” keiyaA sings on ‘think about it / what u think’, before asking with deadly calm rage, “what you think about the fact the world as we know it was shaped by hate and conquering and murder overflowing?”

The album is spacious yet claustrophobic, improvisatory yet focused. You find something new with each return visit: the percussive panting on motions, the way thirsty starts like a blast of radio dial from a passing car, the simple delight of the line “my landlord is a fool”. Hooke’s Law is rigorous as a physics lesson, but in a sexier, funnier way – coiled, and ready to pounce.