Yola Shares "Diamond Studded Shoes," Announces Sophomore Album & Tour Dates

Bristol’s Yola has a busy rest of 2021 ahead of her. The soul singer announced Thursday that her sophomore album is on its way, and that she’ll be joining Chris Stapleton on his rescheduled tour this summer. Her new album Stand For Myself is set for release on July 30 via Easy Eye Sound, and the lead single “Diamond Studded Shoes” is out now.

Yola’s new record was produced by Dan Auerbach. The singer was originally supposed to tour with Auerbach and the rest of The Black Keys, along with Stapleton, before the pandemic began. The new album came from the free time allotted by the cancellation of both the stadium tour and the filming of Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming Elvis biopic, in which Yola will play Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “Diamond Studded Shoes” is proof enough that her newly found free time wasn’t wasted—deceptively joyous, Yola smiles through disaster after disaster in the song’s music video as the feel-good vintage Americana-pop masks the exhaustion of constantly fighting to make the world better.

Yola said of “Diamond Studded Shoes” in a statement:

This song explores the false divides created to distract us from those few who are in charge of the majority of the world’s wealth and use the ‘divide and conquer’ tactic to keep it. This song calls on us to unite and turn our focus to those with a stranglehold on humanity.

The video is in part inspired by the Truman show and is about being trapped in a false construct. It is supposedly perfect, but you’re trapped in a life that wasn’t meant for you. I wanted to convey the feeling that everything you know to be true is not quite working the way it’s supposed to. The island at the end is a paradigm of mental conditioning, we are all trapped on an island of our own thinking, until we change it.

Yola Shares “Diamond Studded Shoes,” Announces Sophomore Album & Tour Dates