As Yola focused on the new My Way EP

YolaHer music has always been hard to pin down, but she just loves it — and her new EP, my wayit’s no different.

“I’ve been planning this 100 percent for years,” the 41-year-old singer-songwriter exclusively said Us Weekly of her new project, which dropped as of Friday, January 17. “I’m not a minimalist, I’m a total maximalist. So I kind of turned back the time from that part of my life.”

“That Part” refers to her years as a vocalist in the London music scene, lending her powerful pipes to acts such as Massive Attack and Bugz in the Attic. However, when she later embarked on a solo career, many listeners (and critics) in the US mistakenly believed that she was primarily influenced by Americana, thanks in part to the country vibes on her debut album, Walking through fire. The truth is that she was always involved in everything – and my way it allowed her to tap into the broken beat and trip hop sounds she had been exploring a decade before anyone knew her name.

“They definitely put me in boxes, which I guess helped keep me reserved, so I wouldn’t fight it too much,” she explained. “You fall into scenes even though you don’t necessarily fit into those scenes. … I was associated with country country and I definitely had people in the country scene driving for me. My associations kind of brought me to that space, but they weren’t my origin at all, musically.”

Yola’s second full-length album, Stand up for Yourselfit seemed more faithful to her, but the label of Americana remained even as her audience expanded.

“This has all been a process of getting closer and closer to being able to tell my story and my narrative of what my exposure to music was and is,” she told Our. “When I was a published writer and writing for people who were in the folk kind of space, I definitely had projects that were in that kind of space. But those who were most successful were closer to the soul space. My role has always been in some permutation of soul music, either through dance music, or in this broken beat scene, or in jazz. My approach has always been closeness to the soul and that was my mission. I feel like I started it Stand up for Yourselfand I may be taking it to the furthest full track on this EP.”

Fans who have seen Yola preview some of her new songs at live shows over the past year or so know my way it doesn’t sound like anything she’s released before. “Future Enemies” opens with a pulsating electronic beat before building into a soaring, arena-ready chorus, while “Ready” is directly inspired by the broken rhythm scene that Yola came up with over the years in the UK

But if those fans had been paying close attention, they might have guessed the direction she was headed, as she sprinkled soul covers throughout her sets. “I told you exactly the plan!” she joked.

Yola’s promotion of her narrative has spread to my way cover, which shows her wearing a crown and lying between two extremely muscular (and shirtless) men.

“I’ve talked to people about photo shoots I’ve done that were so ashy. … I asked myself: ‘Why are we burning me like this?'” she recalled. “And so I made this Pinterest map, which was how to light me and how not to light me. I put all my bad, ashen photos in one, and then a bunch of juicy, sweet photos in another – and there were too many in one and too few in the other.”

The concept was inspired by her Ghanaian and Bajan origins, as well as her skin tone, which she says lightened after she moved from dreary London to relatively sunny Tennessee and later New York City.

“I really said, ‘I really need to be in my equatorial bag.’ I really need to give hydrated, melanized, African, Caribbean, give my bloodlines, give where my body wants to be,” she said. “When you see that photo, you think, ‘Black people had to be involved in this,’ because this is different feeling. It feels equatorial, it feels thoughtful in a way that it can understand and see my beauty without trying to bleach, without trying to f*cking highlighter make my skin tone look lighter, without wanting to retouch my nose to make it straighter.”

The result is an image that is instantly iconic, fitting for a woman who made her Broadway debut last year as Persephone in Hadestown and the embodied pioneer of rock Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the big screen in 2022 Elvis.

“I am the main character. I have been served,” added Yola. “The way I am loved is through service. I do not serve that world, that expectation which is the lion’s share of people’s expectations of me. I drive a stake into that vampire’s heart and it dies. Everything about making this record flew in the face of all the things the world expects from someone who looks like me.”

Yolina my way The EP is out now. her Sovereign soul the tour kicks off in Denver on May 10. Tickets will go on sale on Friday, January 24th, with a pre-sale for fans just around the corner. Details will be forthcoming here.