Yolanda Quartey has always done it her way. Self-determination has been the English singer-songwriter’s primary subject ever since she made a splash at AmericanaFest back in 2016, and she arrived in Nashville with a gift for turning empowerment into poetry. Following the breezy acoustic folk of 2016’s Orphan Offering, she signed with Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Records and immediately began assembling a small but diverse catalog that ranged from the opulent countrypolitan soul of 2019’s Walk Through Fire to the lush ’70s roller-skate pop of 2021’s Stand for Myself. Her songs were never going to get the attention of country radio, of course, but she nevertheless managed to carve out a career in Nashville: touring with Chris Stapleton, singing with the Highwomen, and triumphantly headlining the Ryman Auditorium.
My Way, her first release since leaving Easy Eye and signing with S-Curve, sounds like a regrouping, shutting the door on one phase of her career while opening another. These five very different songs show her range as a songwriter, singer, and auteur, but they fit together primarily as a souvenir of a session. Yola recorded them out in Los Angeles with producers Sean Douglas and Zach Skelton, who have more experience with artists like Meghan Trainor, Lizzo, and Selena Gomez. They rehash some ideas from her previous albums and hint at some intriguing paths Yola might take on her next release, but My Way plays more like a placeholder than a major statement. Each song stands for itself, some more shakily than others.
If there is a common theme, it’s sex. My Way is a deeply thirsty record. With its strutting rhythm section, “Temporary” could be a Stand for Myself outtake, but at least it shows Yola’s ability to draw rich complexities out of everyday romantic predicaments. She makes resisting temptation sound tempting: A “no” can be as meaningful as anything that comes after a “yes.” On the other hand, “Symphony” proves that errant similes are anything but sexy. Even Yola can’t muster up the charisma to sell the come-on in the chorus: “Play my heart strings with both hands, and I’ll sing like a symphony.”
Perhaps the best moment on My Way is a song that sounds like it’s rooted in Yola’s pre-Nashville career. Before moving to the States, she was active in London’s broken-beat scene, where she collaborated with Bugz in the Attic, as well as groups like Massive Attack and Sub Focus. Dance has always motivated her music—she revived her Bugz cover of Yarborough & Peoples’ disco banger “Don’t Stop the Music” at the Ryman—but it comes to the fore on “Future Enemies,” with its percolator beat, distorted chorus, and robot vocal at the end. The setting gives Yola a lot to work with as a singer: She holds back on the verses, adopting a conversational delivery that allows her to daydream about how this tryst might go down: “You’re looking how you’re looking, so it’s even harder to say no to what I want.” She snaps out of it on the chorus, attacking an intricate hook so fearlessly that she sounds like the scolding angel on her own shoulder. It’s a powerful drama in four minutes.
That leaves “Ready” as the odd song out, a leftfield experiment that’s exactly the kind of thing that EPs are made for yet doesn’t quite fit the mood or subject matter of the other songs. The idea is compelling: It’s a call to members of the African diaspora to be ready to leave the Western world and return to their common home. But if the other four songs are made for dancefloors, this one is made for the stage, a piece of musical theater perhaps drawn from Yola’s recent experience playing Persephone in Hadestown. Even more awkward than its wordy chorus is its placement on the EP. It’s tacked on to the end of My Way, almost as an afterthought; it might be more effective as the introduction to a very different set of songs that are more communal than sexual, more public than private. Perhaps on a more confident album, such a sequencing slip-up might not be remarkable, but here, it makes her mighty voice sound strangely tentative.
