Can a dark night of the soul be fun? keiyaA thinks so. The producer and singer’s second album is a freewheeling journey through clubs, bedrooms, and panic that’s as cheeky and propulsive as it is heavy. Where her debut Forever, Ya Girl was affirmational and atmospheric, healing incense for working folks trying to get by, Hooke’s Law is an accelerant. Over staggering tracks overrun with rhythms, melodies, and voices, keiyaA hurtles through the abyss and dares you to keep up. She wants to take up space, to eat her landlord, to be chewed like pastrami on rye by a lover who follows her hips and the latest headlines. These are rider anthems for after the crashout.
The album title references a law of classical physics that describes how certain objects survive the imposition of force. When a coil is stretched, for instance, it can shift back without losing shape. keiyaA sees that elasticity in her battles with depression and loss, and dedicates the album to describing the feeling of being constantly squeezed and prodded by the world. As she put it in an interview, Hooke’s law helped her realize “a downward spiral is a loaded spring.”
Embracing that ethos, she prioritizes tension, narrating struggles with love and mental health in the nervous heat of real time. The unruly arrangements flow freely from drunken R&B to racing breakbeats to mellow IDM. Sound effects and warped samples abound: explosions, shattering glass, the iconic Lex Luger riser, clips of poems by Jayne Cortez and Pat Parker, and a flip of Jadakiss’ “U Make U Wanna.” The flux highlights her playfulness as a songwriter; you can feel her chuckling to herself when she begins a confessional about being frustratingly horny with a clip of Gucci Mane’s slut-shaming “Thirsty.” Through it all, keiyaA shows off a widened repertoire of scats and harmonies, often using Auto-Tune to stretch her cool melodies into tumbling streams of consciousness. It’s as if she’s cranked up the volume of the monologues from her past music.