"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 album, To Myself, in 2019, her songs have been a cocktail of genres far more retro than neo — anchored by a classic voice that is oaky, smoky and sweet, like a Fireball old fashioned — but with a distinct chicness. YEARNALISM stops fighting destiny and embraces a more vintage sheen, deftly avoiding straight pastiche through its careful interrogation of personal desire. It eases from Motown sound to Philly soul to Stax deep cuts to Big Mama Thornton blues and beyond, scouring the songbook for answers. Still, the singer is not after a universal tonic for what ails her; on the contrary, she knows no such thing exists. Instead, Rose longs to legitimize her longing as a feeling with its own indulgences, one that needs no further payoff.
Yearning takes many forms here. Opener "When I'm Gone" tries to shake loose someone who has crawled under her skin ("I tell myself I'll be fine without you / Then I keep holding on"), while "The Reason" relishes being head over heels. Some songs find excitement in toying with risk and opportunity; others slip into the quicksand of pining after a love clearly lost. The door opens for something casual to become something more ("Is This Love"), or the itch for liberation haunts a relationship that has become a prison ("Let Me Go").
"Sunday" is about yearning more broadly, emphasizing the power of imagination to envision a future beyond the most likely one: "Gonna start a new beginning / Maybe find my way," Rose croaks. Its porch soul briefly explodes into blues rock before inching into "Believe Me," a fantasy where an answered phone call becomes an open line to possibility. Finding a way is always feasible, but these songs do not attempt to close loops. They linger in moments, settling in the transitional spaces between relationships, where the story of each romance is not yet written — a limbo quality that lets Rose's singing tug at the ambiguity.
YEARNALISM is as consumed by regret as by desire, treating them as sides of the same coin. Yearning is defined by space, but where some songwriters prioritize the distance of a lover who can't be accessed, or nostalgia for a time that can never be relived, Rose knows proximity to be just as impactful. "I don't hate you, I'm just over it / Oh, and I need a world of space / No, I'm not afraid to love and lose / I guess that's more than I can say for you," she sings on "But, Nvm," pulling on "space" as if literally trying to extend it.
This kind of interplay is epitomized by the dynamic, intoxicating "Friends Again," a simmering duet with Leon Thomas that grapples with a one-night stand as a potential point of no return for a friendship. Regret and desire are equally represented, and the thrill is in not knowing which wins out. The way she boils down the words "ever" and "same" in the chorus draws a clear separation between what was and what will now be, a powerful tension that suffuses the important turns in each of these songs, emphasizing just how tenuous it all really is.
The greatest revelation to come of this record, though, is that Baby Rose's voice is the ultimate vessel for a consideration of yearning that has long been pursued across the rhythm & blues continuum, and yet lately seems to have atomized. It's no secret that the singer possesses one of the most unique and exquisite instruments in music, but YEARNALISM is the first album to activate that voice to its full potential. Rose recently explained that she tracked her vocals on an ancient microphone not intended for singing, and that when she tried again with better equipment, something was lost. "We tried it and everyone in the room agreed that the new version sounded technically better, but it didn't have the emotional depth of the original take," she recounted. "That's when I realized the first few takes are sacred. There's uncertainty there. You don't fully know what you're doing yet."
Uncertainty is the freedom that allows for nuance and fluidity, and in these songs, her execution borders on rhapsodic. Her singing is so rich and full of character, so consumed by the exploration of urges. The songs mirror that precariousness, every open-ended question leaving room for suggestion. Listening, there is a sense that a heart confiding in itself can show the way — not to any sort of enlightened resolution, but to a wishful state of being as its own reward.
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