31/10/25
Chicago-born, NYC-based singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and producer keiyaA announces the details of her highly anticipated, sophomore album hooke’s law, out October 31st on XL Recordings. Written and produced over five years, hooke’s law is keiyaA’s document of survival through self-interrogation. The album deconstrusts and rebuilds her ego on her own terms, offering a safe space to process conflicting roles she faced growing up as a queer Black woman. Embracing discomfort and contradiction, keiyaA rejects the demand for neat resolution, instead honoring multivalence - allowing all her past, present and future selves to coexist in harmony, friction and confusion across a genre-defying blend of jazz, R&B, hip-hop, electronic, and experimental music. Today keiyaA shares the project's second single “take it,” accompanied by a second self-co-directed music video with Caity Arthur, which follows last month’s “stupid prizes.”
Known for her penetrating explorations of Black womanhood and liberation, keiyaA reemerges post her 2020 debut Forever, Ya Girl with greater intensity and unbound experimentation. In the wake of her first theatrical stage play, milk thot, keiyaA arrives to present hooke’s law, which she explains is:
“an album about the journey of self love, from an angle that isn’t all affirmations and capitalistic self-care. it’s not a linear story with a moral at the end. It's more of a cycle, a spiral - it’s Hooke's law.
With this work i aim to interrogate and embrace anger and conflict, disappointment and dissatisfaction, about not being docile and about rejecting mammyism and traditional expectations of fat black brown and dark skinned women in our communities. i speak about desire + longing, about examining maladaptive tendencies, conflict avoidance - the eternal relationship with the self.”
With milk thot, an experimental play staged at Abron’s Art Center in Brooklyn in January, keiyaA offered a prelude to hooke’s law by confronting her shadow self in a ritual of deconstruction and rebirth. Blurring the boundaries between actor and audience, the play continually remade itself, dissolving the idea of a fixed character of linear narrative. In doing so, milk thot set the stage for the radical self-interrogation and multiplicity that drive hooke’s law.
In 2020, keiyaA released her self-produced debut album Forever, Ya Girl, which earned widespread critical acclaim. The project went on to receive Pitchfork’s “Best New Music” designation, landed on year-end best-of lists from The New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, and The Guardian, and was later named to Pitchfork’s Best of the Decade So Far list. It also drew praise from artists including Solange, Jay-Z, Earl Sweatshirt, Blood Orange, Kimberly Drew, and Moses Sumney. The album announced keiyaA as one of music’s most vital new voices and producers, and the attention it garnered gave her the access to expand on her creative vision—one that has since grown into a thriving garden of projects, performances, and collaborations, each distinct but rooted in her singular artistry.
Since Forever, Ya Girl, keiyaA showcased her dynamism through a Tiny Desk concert, high-profile performances at Solange’s El Dorado Ballroom show at BAM, Wales Bonner’s Togetherness presentation at the Guggenheim, ESSENSE’s Girls United Summit, Bourse de Commerce in Paris, Theaster Gates’ Kenwood Garden community space and MoMA PS1, as well as collaborations with Telfar and Nike. All of these milestones culminated earlier this year in milk thot, her first full-length state production - a multidisciplinary work of music, poetry, acting, choreography - that marked a bold new evolution in keiyaA’s storytelling.
Tracklisting: