Album Review: Jean by Yebba

On Jean, Yebba stops mourning long enough to realize she’s jealous of her own ability to move on. She names her second album after her late grandmother.

Courtesy of RCA Records.

Almost five years passed between Dawn and anything resembling a follow-up. In that stretch, Abbey Smith appeared for an interlude on Certified Lover Boy, turned up on Tyler, the Creator’s Don’t Tap The Glass, and stood next to Robert Glasper at his Blue Note residency. The kind of scattered credits that keep a vocalist’s name warm without ever demanding she say something new on her own terms. Yebba became the singer other singers called when they needed a voice that could carry someone else’s song without disappearing into it. That reputation is a compliment and a cage. Jean, her second album, sounds like a person who spent half a decade deciding whether the cage was comfortable enough to stay in and concluded, sometime around the third or fourth year, that it wasn’t.

The album’s first real position arrives before anything kicks into overdrive.

“No money, no nepotism, no favoritism, no nothing
But I stuck to my guns, and God made good on his promise.”

Then the turn: “What if I forgave it all?/Be the laughing stock of every guard at every wall.” She’s not describing forgiveness as a feeling. She’s describing it as a public humiliation you volunteer for, a willingness to look stupid in front of everyone who told you not to trust this. The question she reaches, “maybe that’s how forgiveness feels,” shows up again almost word for word seven songs later on “Seven Years.” She’s spent the entire track counting the cost of remembering someone: “Seven years of rage, did I lose my mind?/Dare I strike the page, will I waste my life?” The rage isn’t metaphorical. She’s asking whether writing about it was worth the years it took. And “West Memphis” puts the same impulse in a different body entirely. She sneaks into a stream with a cigarette, a neighbor shows up with a cup of tea, and then the line that cuts through everything surrounding it: “What’s realer than the part of you that you don’t even claim?” The chorus refuses the usual consolations, claiming “it ain’t the booze, it ain’t the bars, it ain’t the trip to Mars,” and that there’s “a well dug down deep inside you,” and you either drink from it or you don’t.

Somewhere around the album’s middle third, Yebba stops praying and starts wanting things. “Of Course” is the funniest song she’s ever written and possibly the meanest. A man calls her Mademoiselle, and she thinks it’s fucking fun as hell. She hopes he kisses and tells. Her ex is fucking her place again. Somebody’s stealing from the mall. A man slides into her DMs, and she reports it as a scam.

“He probably hits it up again
All these men are fucking scams.”

Every verse closes the same way, “of course,” and the cadence never shifts to match the escalation from flirtation to disgust. That flatness is the whole argument. She isn’t building toward outrage; the scam was obvious from the start, and she participated anyway because she wanted to. “Aggressive” strips the comedy out and leaves just the want: “Spit it out, hotel couch, make a mess of us.” “Waterfall” tangles desire with self-doubt in the same bed, “Even my inner critic is still a mystic.” Copper threads run from her head through the mattress as it spins on its axis. She adores you, and she’d risk the pride before the fall, and she has no clue what the writings on the wall say. Three separate ways to want a person across three songs, and none of them apologize or explain.

While Dawn was built around one catastrophe, Jean has a harder problem. What happens when the catastrophe fades, and you’re still here, missing not the pain exactly but the version of yourself who knew what to feel. “Yellow Eyes” puts it plainly. Two people flooded the bank together, yellowed their eyes together, and now the house they shared feels unfurnished but still feels like home. The killer line isn’t dramatic: “Think I’m jealous about movin’ on.” Jealous of her own forward motion, of the part of her that stopped coming around. “Alright” digs into that vein, “I’ve grown in love with complaining/And underexplaining my pride,” and arrives at a claim worth arguing about: “there is no virtue in poverty/And all in all, love is still kind.” She hated LA. Missing her made the city worse, And she decided, after all of it, that being broke doesn’t make you righteous and being hurt doesn’t mean love failed. “Different Light” catches someone after the departure, “You struck the street and left your coat on the floor,” and wonders if he’s even cold anymore. She’s losing her mind on an era defined by moments they can’t make. The shadows are caught in a different line. A new moon follows.

The album is named after her grandmother, Jean, a woman who helped raise her in West Memphis. She doesn’t eulogize her anywhere on the record. No tribute track, no spoken interlude, no deathbed recollection. “Water & Wonderlust” says there’s a tendency not to be wedded to the new, to be wedded to the excitement of novelty, to measure everything in our lives. It serves us. The telephone wires don’t reach that far anymore, and she’s sad she’s missing somewhere else in the world. “Earth, Wind & California” toasts to keeping your friends from aging, then buries the knife:

“The real ones are gone
Prolonging death to suck it for the man
Who only makes us come to meetings about meetings.”

It has the cadence of clinking glasses and the timing of a graveside visit. “Delicate Roots” goes somewhere stranger, imagining herself as a superhero swinging from the universe, then as a forgotten drinker put on a shelf. These are the lights in her room, collecting dust. Come too close, and she’ll shoot. Naming your best work after the woman who gave you permission to be yourself is its own kind of prayer—and she already said on the first track that she’s done asking whether prayer is enough.

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “Alright,” “West Memphis,” “Seven Years”