Baby Rose's voice is always searching. 'YEARNALISM' gives it a home
"My heart can confide in itself / No, I don't need no one else / To show me the way," the incandescent singer Baby Rose once disclosed, consoling herself on the funky song "Fight Club" from her 2023 album Through and Through.Part of a spirited self-pep talk, the line is a useful way to think about her music.
The act of confiding in oneself is the central conceit for many of her songs — a means to make a path forward, treating external voices as brush to be cleared.But the songs really work because of a crucial contradiction in that logic: A heart that can only confide in itself is always second-guessing.
("I wanna mean what I say," she adds a few bars later, showing her hand.) Being forlorn and in her own head complicates this artist's narratives, her inner monologue gaining depth and subtlety thanks to an indelible, even more interior voice that is constantly seeking someone else to believe in.Ever since her breakthrough single found her sitting all to herself at 3 a.m.
thinking about her dearly departed heart, she's been reaching out for something.Rose's new album, YEARNALISM, takes that search a step further, offering passionate songs that struggle with desire and the myriad ways gratification can hover out of reach.Joining Baduizm, SongVersation and "hateration" in the long and wonderful index of R&B neologisms, the title functions as a succinct summation of the feeling she chases across the record.
If Moses Sumney's Aromanticism was a bid to, as he put it, "interrogate the idea that romance is normative and necessary," then YEARNALISM sees it in everything, casting romance as elusive and yet eternally worth pursuing.More than anything, the album reckons with the reality that yearning is about the promise of a thing, divorced from the actual result.
In circling that epiphany, it fully realizes the promise of its central star.Baby Rose has frequently been shuffled under the neo-soul banner, mostly for lack of a more comfortable slot.Since her debut al...