How Yola Centered Herself on New My Way EP

Yola’s music has always been hard to pin down genre-wise, but that’s just the way she likes it — and her new EP, My Way, is no different.

“I have 100 percent been planning this for years,” the singer-songwriter, 41, exclusively told Us Weekly of her new project, which dropped Friday, January 17. “I’m not a minimalist, I’m a total maximalist. So this is me kind of getting the time back from that part of my life.”

“That part” refers to the years when she worked as a vocalist in London’s music scene, contributing her powerful pipes to artists like Massive Attack and Bugz in the Attic. When she established a solo career later on, however, many U.S. listeners (and critics) erroneously believed her main influence was Americana, thanks in part to the country-tinged vibes on her debut album, Walk Through Fire. The truth is that she’s always dabbled in everything — and My Way allowed her to tap into the broken beat and trip hop sounds that she was exploring a decade ago before anyone knew her name.

“I definitely got put into boxes, which I suppose helped me get booked, so I wouldn’t fight it too hard,” she explained. “You get into scenes even though you don’t necessarily fit into those scenes. … I had country associations and I definitely had people in the country scene who rode for me. So my associations kind of brought me into that space, but they weren’t my origins at all, musically.”

Yola’s second full-length album, Stand for Myself, felt truer to her, but the Americana label stuck even as her audience expanded.

“All of this has been this process of edging ever closer to being able to tell my story and my narrative of what my exposure to music was and is,” she told Us. “When I was a published writer and I would write for people that would be in the folksy kind of space, I definitely had projects that were in that kind of space. But the ones that were most successful were closer to the soul space. My role was always in some permutation of soul music, be it over dance music, be it in this broken beat scene, be it in jazz. My approach was always soul proximity, and so that’s been my mission. I feel like I started that on Stand for Myself, and I am maybe taking it to its furthest integer in this EP.”

Fans who’ve seen Yola preview some of her new songs at live shows over the past year or so know that My Way doesn’t sound quite like anything she’s released before. “Future Enemies” begins with a pulsing electronic beat before building to a soaring, arena-ready chorus, while “Ready” is directly inspired by the broken beat scene Yola came up in during her years in the U.K.

If those fans were paying close attention, though, they might have guessed which direction she was heading in, as she’s been sprinkling soul covers throughout her sets. “I’ve told you exactly the plan!” she quipped.

Yola’s reclamation of her narrative extended to the My Way cover art, which shows her wearing a crown and reclining between two extremely muscled (and shirtless) men.

“I was talking to people about photo shoots I’d done that were so ashy. … I was like, ‘Why are we lighting me like this?’” she recalled. “And so I made this folder in Pinterest, which was how to light me and how not to light me. I put all of the bad, ashy-ass photos of me in one and then the handful of juicy-looking, delectable photos in the other — and there were too many in one and not enough in the other.”

The concept was inspired by her Ghanaian and Bajan heritage as well as her own skin tone, which she says brightened up once she moved from gloomy London to the comparatively sunny Tennessee and later New York City.

“I really was like, ‘I really need to be in my equatorial bag.’ I really need to be giving moisturized, giving melanated, giving African, giving Caribbean, giving in my bloodlines, giving where my body wants to be,” she said. “When you see that photo, you are like, ‘Black people had to be involved in this,’ because this feels different. It feels equatorial, it feels conceived in a way that is able to understand and see my beauty without trying to bleach it, without trying to freaking burn it out with freaking highlighter to make my skin tone look lighter, without wanting to retouch my nose straighter.”

The result is an image that’s instantly iconic, fitting for a woman who made her Broadway debut last year as Persephone in Hadestown and embodied rock pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe on the big screen in 2022’s Elvis.

“I am the main character. I am being served,” Yola added. “The way that I am loved is through service. I am not serving that world, that expectation that is the lion’s share of people’s expectation of me. I’m putting a stake through the heart of that vampire and it is dying. Everything in the making of this record was flying in the face of all the things that the world expects of someone that looks like me.”

Yola’s My Way EP is out now. Her Sovereign Soul tour kicks off in Denver on May 10. Ticket sales will begin Friday, January 24, with fan presales ahead. Details will be available here.