Yaya Bey was three months behind on rent when she dropped 2022’s Remember Your North Star, a confessional R&B-jazz-reggae epic rooted in her experiences of misogynoir and survival. The record earned her critical acclaim and a foothold in the left-of-center neo-soul landscape, ushering her into a level of success she’d been working since 2016 to reach. But just as her career was hitting a new peak, her personal life collapsed. Bey’s father, Ayub (rapper and Juice Crew member Grand Daddy I.U.), died at the end of 2022, and she was suddenly faced with a loss she wasn’t sure she’d ever come back from. She spent the year that followed working through her grief, reforming her personal life (she got married, finally in the kind of loving, unconditional relationship she’d dreamed of on earlier records) while simultaneously preparing her next LP. 2024’s Ten Fold was released during a period of grief but built on affirmative and radically transformative dance cuts.
After the success of Remember Your North Star and Ten Fold, Bey found herself pigeon-holed into a familiar narrative: the voice of Black struggle. But do it afraid is Bey’s rejection of that containment, her declaration that Black life is also full of joy, sensuality, absurdity, vibrancy, and ease. It’s a celebration of everything in her community that fills her cup. (You can see it clearly in the “raisins” video: family, barbershops, food, community, textures of Black life that don’t need a qualifier.) do it afraid battles the absurdity of contemporary life—housing insecurity and stagnant wages, the quiet violence of systems designed to wear you down—while also zooming in on the hyper-personal and finding room to celebrate inexhaustible joy. These are themes Yaya Bey has touched on before (see Ten Fold’s “eric adams in the club,” and RYNS’s “nobody knows”), but here, she approaches them with even more levity.
And the actual music mirrors this emotional whiplash. The record zig-zags between genre and feeling in a way that reflects the disorienting simultaneity of the human condition. Bey flaunts her seamless blend of R&B, rap, soul, and funk while folding in motifs from dancehall and soca. She produced 11 of the album’s 18 tracks, with contributions from the likes of BADBADNOTGOOD (“blicky”), Exaktly (“in a circle,” “aye noche”), and Nigel Hall (“end of the world,” “ask the questions”), among others. From being the life of the party to curling inward, then crawling your way back out again, do it afraid speaks to the saying that healing isn’t linear. It’s a consistent cycle through defeat and triumph, and the things you turn to on the journey between the two (whether it be weed, your family, dancing with your best friends, or an unconditional love).
“wake up bitch” continues Yaya Bey’s tradition of starting her records with a clear-eyed, cut-the-bullshit rap. Over a relaxed, muted groove, her flow takes on a Kendrick-like cadence: calm yet commanding, conversational yet laced with precision, making societal and personal critiques in the same breath. (“Government don’t give a shit / It’s a recession they don’t say but shit I know it is / This shit depression I don’t say but shit I know it is.”) A frustration lingers, ruminating underneath the rest of the album, occasionally rising to the surface. On “cindy rella,” Bey flows from blunt verses to echoing falsettos as she meditates on the reasons for her instinctive distrust early in relationships (“There’s a story before you / You ain’t coming in on a clean slate”). Later on, her exasperation grows: “The other shoe it always drop / Why it don’t fucking give / A bitch a break?” She makes room for flashes of anxiety, the kind that sneak up on you in a moment of euphoria. Nowhere is that emotional whiplash more pronounced than “no for real, wtf?,” the record’s emotional climax. A ballad shaped by tinny cymbals and surging strings, the song swells around lines like “Lost in the world / I thought I knew my way” and “Who am I without a map?” Just when the panic starts to crest, Bey throws out a lifeline: “I just wanna dance / before it all ends.” The only way out is by fully embracing joy.
That pull between weight and levity is threaded through not just Bey’s genre-blurring references, but her exploration of identity. On “merlot & grigio,” she’s joined by Father Philis on breezy soca textures that nod to her Bajan roots. The thumping “bella noches” leans into meme culture, quoting a viral clip from 2015 (“If you can’t go to Bella Noches, where the hell can you go?”) in the chorus. The punching ring of a digital cowbell and swishing synth passes bring an air of nostalgia that matches the decade-old reference. By the time we get to “a surrender,” Bey is leaning into faith, her voice wrapped in a gospel chorus. Each song on the tracklist is a portal into a different part of Bey’s identity, bringing them together without watering them down.
“breakthrough” marks a sonic shift, surging new energy into the album’s back half. Bey’s voice floats over staccato piano and a light 808, reverbed just enough to feel suspended in air. Like much of do it afraid, the arrangement is deceptively minimal; she knows exactly how much space to give a moment for it to hit, never overcrowding the mix. Midway through, right on the line “Swinging from my tatas,” the piano hook flips itself, reversing into a warped, modulated loop. It’s a strange and satisfying mix of analog and digital, pushed further by a flickering backbeat of 16th notes and meticulous syncopation that never loses its center. It’s one of the record’s most subdued moments of play, another instance of Bey pulling herself away from negativity, this time standing up to it directly (“Fuck it now I’m on some savage shit / Wont let y’all do me that way”) while flaunting her razor-sharp production.
Even the brightest, most high-energy stretches of do it afraid carry an undertow. There are reminders everywhere of the active choice being made to step away from pain and anxiety, however comfortable a place it could be. “in a circle” captures Bey pulling herself out from a spiral: “I was in that hole in the dark / I was praying for a new start,” she confesses, before snapping herself out of it (“And now I’m throwing that ass around”). The production follows her mood: warbling, off-kilter marimbas open up into an airy, pulsing beat, a sonic version of shaking off a moment of dissociation. And when Bey can’t pull herself out, she lets others bring her back. “aye noches” opens with a voicemail from a friend calling her out (“Now Yaya I know you not about to be in that motherfucking house, girl”) before kicking into an uptempo boom-chicka beat atop which Bey turns into the life of the party. Elsewhere, on the hazy “blicky,” Bey sounds sedated and slippery, singing through a cloud of auxiliary percussion and THC: “I out run my exes / I out run my taxes / I out run the blues / I out run my foes / I out run rules / I out run the truth.”
That sense of choice, or conscious refusal, is the album’s sharpest edge. Even at her most confessional, Yaya Bey doesn’t wallow. “choice,” the aptly titled closing track, holds one of the record’s rawest verses: “I ain’t been / Having talks with God / Cause what he took away / I miss my dad / I miss my mom / The friends that couldn’t stay.” Bey sits in that doubt, admitting to her wavering faith. But she doesn’t stay there. By the end, she offers herself a reminder: “Choose the light / The light inside of you … Don’t you let ‘em take your sanity.” When choosing happiness, intimacy, ecstasy, peace, whatever it may be, you’re choosing yourself. do it afraid leans into intricacy and contradiction, holding identity close while moving through a world determined to break it down. The record doesn’t offer resolution so much as a means to keep going, through intimate declaratives and upbeat psalms, so the pursuit of joy outweighs the fear of what it might cost.
