Singer-songwriters have always toyed with the tension between music that sounds calm and smooth on the surface, and lyrical sentiments that are everything but. That Yaya Bey’s Remember Your North Star thrives on this contradiction is just part of what gives it its charge, and in the process a bigger-picture tension emerges — the cathartic feeling that arises from the paradox of finding expressive power in your own vulnerability. Her lyrics are grounded in the perspective of a Black woman given to wondering why love can be so hard to find — not just romance, but a deeper feeling of belonging and respect — and speaks on it with a mix of autobiographical specificity and relatable clarity that instills empathy even (or especially) when she’s talking shit. The line from “keisha” about how “the pussy so, so good and you still don’t love me” is a powerful pull-quote go-to example, but those unfiltered expressions of emotional turmoil hit hard everywhere — in the depictions of unrequited love and familial efforts to break that cycle (“mama loves her son”), the clash between needful desire and the self-doubt over her own desirability (“street fighter blues”), and the fact that even an ordinary day-to-day life feels like a far bigger ordeal than it should be (“nobody knows”). And her musicality has that same sense of restlessness, working under the necessary idea that R&B’s long-running multi-faceted embodiment of Black expression should stretch as far back (to the postwar vocal jazz atmosphere of “Rolling Stoner” in its first verse), far ahead (which then flashes forwards 70 years in its waning half-minute of gauzy ambient neo-neo-soul), and as far out (the swimming-backwards psychedelia of “Don’t Fucking Call Me” and “Blessings”) as possible.