Album Review: Sound Therapy by JWords
On her second solo LP, the Brooklyn producer finally raps and sings over her own beats—and the quietest moments say the most.
The name JWords tells on itself. Jennifer Hernandez chose it when she was still an MC, years before the production work consumed everything, before she gave a decade of her beats to other people’s records. As one half of H31R with Maassai, she made two albums of fractured dance-rap that drew a Gilles Peterson co-sign, an international tour, and a KEXP session; she produced Nappy Nina’s Double Down in 2021 and worked with Semiratruth on loading... the following year. Between those collaborations, her own instrumental tapes and EPs were coming out so fast they blurred together: Sin Señal, two dancepack volumes, Year 2300, Sonic Liberation, brainecho, untitled, beauty in everything, downloads, all between 2020 and 2024. Her debut solo LP, Self-Connection, came through the fashion brand UNIF’s label Bubble Verse in 2022. Her voice stayed behind the boards on all of it.
Sound Therapy changes that. Hernandez raps and croons over rhythms she programmed on Teenage Engineering hardware (an OP-XY, OP-1, KO II, TX-6, and TP-7) in a home studio. “L0tus” opened with soul-flecked synth phrases over a hip-hop drum pocket, warm enough to feel like a space heater clicking on in a cold apartment. “Gr8ful” crawled along on synths that twitched once or twice per measure, while “FELT” started with a heavy techno kick that slowly loosened into something calmer. Swarvy’s mastering kept the lo-fi grain consistent across all nine songs, and on the instrumentals especially, the roughness was earned by the machines themselves.
When she does pick up the mic, she mostly talks to herself. “void 222” is her rapping with no percussion, just her and a droning synth, circling a question she can’t pin down: “We all move around tryna fill some void/I don’t even know what the void is.” On “LoveCrime,” she raps over a half-speed groove that keeps bending away from her, writing herself a letter she doesn’t seem sure she’ll read:
“This a letter to myself
When I fall in love
Don’t fall in too deep
Shit is steep
With no one to catch me.”
She watched her old self fade on that song; she called emotions a narcotic and the whole experience a crime against herself. “Change 101” goes more direct, praying every step, paying for stability, pulling her shadow self close. The rhymes are rough, the cadences loose, and some lyrics skew into affirmation territory, “I’m a star/I’ma shine,” landing about as heavy as the words on a motivational poster. But the home-studio roughness (everything recorded on a Teenage Engineering kit that would fit in a backpack, which is both charming and slightly insane) keeps these admissions honest. She left it on.
Nappy Nina’s guest spot on “Clarity” is the tightest rapping here, by a wide margin. Over a rhythm caught between footwork and Jersey Club, Nina gets her funds up, watches “too many lights to see all the stars,” and steers into, “better observed/Better dispersed,” a sixteen-bar sprint about worth and visibility that’s quicker and more sure-footed than anything Hernandez spits on the record. Kingsley Ibeneche (a Nigerian-American singer and dancer from Camden who’d worked alongside Alicia Keys and Bilal) closes the LP on “Break Me,” his plea dissolving into the synths; he wants somebody completely but can feel trouble from a distance. Both guests were given songs that fit them. Hernandez had her own line worth hearing, though. What did she have to say? On “LoveCrime,” she rapped:
“It’s like I’m in a drive-by
Of my own life
Saying goodbye to my old self.”
Solid (★★★½☆)
Favorite Track(s): “void 222,” “Clarity,” “LoveCrime”