Album Review: why do women jump in the fire? by Avara
The Marietta-raised singer-producer follows her collaborative healing tape with Hindi-laced R&B love songs that keep striking matches.
Located a half hour’s drive from downtown Atlanta along the interstate, Marietta, Georgia, is far enough away for a first-generation Indian kid to feel, according to her words, “never a part of the brown community but never completely a part of the American community.” Avara grew up in Marietta, studied Indian classical singing and dancing and piano, completed a business degree at Emory University, learned production software during quarantine and began uploading meditative R&B and soul tracks. By last summer, she had begun her first tour in Brooklyn, sitting amid a bed of roses. The collaborative 2025 effort (A Softer Place to Land) was dedicated to the South Asian artists surrounding her. She called the next one why do women jump in the fire?, recording it as she burned.
Avara is the woman in that question and the ones she writes, approaching the fire with wide-open eyes. In the song “kamikaze,” she introduces herself above percussive tapping and bass hits, “Fire burning, kamikaze/Static running through my body/Apocalyptic, so erotic,” before offering herself as the crimson bride, the alibi dressed for a wedding ceremony. Shreea Kaul takes a verse in that track, turning apocalyptic into a grocery shopping run, filling up a backpack with ammunition and wads of money, promising “I’ma coming at you like a fucking bandit.” Avara uses the same lit match in a different way on “confession,” singing about burning everything and letting people call her hunger sin, dropping her hardest truth: “If they fear the woman, they’ll call her crazy.” The Hindi she switches into right after keeps the aag, the fire, in the native language. She finishes the track in conversation with Neha, saying that she is shrinking herself and calling it compromise, that she keeps promising it’ll get better and has been doing so for months, that she doesn’t have to do this.
Avara sings “yasmeen” in a style most resembling her classical education – long ornamented phrases with pauses and held notes above the rounded bass and hand percussion groove, lament over hook built around a creed that she will not abandon: “It’s the things that you choose/When there’s nothing to lose/That matters.” Singer credited as Akshara opens and closes “levitate” in Hindi, while Avara occupies the middle in English, warning “I’m a fire you won’t tame.” In the bridge, she travels from ashes to ashes to death and your taxes, to promises that everyone fooling with matches will get burnt.
In “same page,” Avara wants two things at once, “I wanna get closer/Please don’t let me get closer,” above a thick bassline and muted kick, and she asks her man directly if they are still on the same page. She makes the request on the scale in “what did you think love would be?,” expecting honey on her tongue and a slice of heaven, taking the bite, and getting a sword to fall on, once sacrifice and once tragedy. “We tried our best ‘til we did our worst,” she says, over the kick and snare beat, leaving space for the vocals. “poison” loses the heavy bassline, wrapping a narrow chord pattern around her voice as she tries to taste of someone’s poison that makes him afraid of emotion and runs at the slightest commotion.
Death interrupts the love songs in “we all die the same,” where Avara sings about chasing peace of mind and fighting for her halo above the slow R&B march, and an unnamed spoken voice joins her to remind that she made her choice, that she knows nothing, that everything is hopeless. While from the ashes flowers bloom, she answers, the harmony below moving in circles. She tackles the big questions in “yarn” and receives the least clear answer to them. The spoken intro asks whether she will be enough and if evil is real, and the sung part responds to those questions with scattered imagery: “I’m treading on snow lately/In this giant folio/And it’s a trap swings and a toy.” The folio, the maze, and the toy don’t unite in the track, and “yarn” is when her lyrics become most vague. “reincarnation” is a shorter track, a chord pattern, light percussion taps, and her voice wondering whether it’s that bad if nothing ever lasts.
Avara writes best on the street level, using brand names of pharmacies and mailing addresses. On “potion no. 4,” she swallows Tylenol as if it might heal her wounds, after the verse “Heart’s so full of bullet holes/Band-Aids ain’t gon’ keep ‘em closed,” above the thick synth-bass and hand percussion details creating a ritual feeling in the hook. “alchemy” gives a picture of blood spilled on the pavement and she only wants to lie there, months late on the payments, loved by a man who calls her his favorite and wants to make her nameless; she lets her body turn to marble and calls her soul “a canteen” that she can’t keep. She becomes homesick most of all in “winston street,” asking an ex if he still thinks about her passing through their street, if he still loves Thai tea with honey and remembering her daddy saying “Don’t play games.” She was living on the west side while he was staying near the beach, and after the end of the singing she talks plainly, nowhere in her life being a home except music, except creating.
In the second half of “snowglobe,” she stops singing and speaks:
“I thought if I sacrificed enough
It would mean something
But the fire only lived as long as I stayed
And I don't live there anymore.”
She tries leaving on “starting over,” the duet with Grace Sorensen above warm keys and light drums. “I really don’t like starting over/But you make me feel like I can do this again,” she sings, and admits that she already passed through the fire; Sorensen answers from close proximity with “I swear you could never be replaced.” In the hook, Avara tells herself to get out of her own head and that she thinks she has known her destination from the beginning. The two women keep their voices low through the whole track, tender and uncertain, which is the honest way to sing it.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “confession,” “potion no. 4,” “winston street”