Can a dark night of the soul still hit like a block party? keiyaA thinks so. On Hooke’s Law, the Chicago-born producer and singer doesn’t just document chaos—she grooves through it. Her second album is a delirious ride through bedrooms, basements, and breakdowns, where heartbreak, horniness, and humor twist around each other like smoke. If her 2020 debut Forever, Ya Girl was incense and intention—a balm for the overworked and underpaid—then Hooke’s Law is a Molotov cocktail. It’s music for when you’ve run out of affirmations and need a reason to dance in the wreckage.
The title, borrowed from classical physics, describes how a spring can stretch and still return to shape. keiyaA turns that elasticity into philosophy: resilience as recoil. “A downward spiral is a loaded spring,” she’s said, and that concept hums beneath every track. Her songs throb with nervous energy, bouncing between R&B, breakbeats, IDM, and pure sonic anarchy. The palette is wild and self-aware—shattering glass, Lex Luger risers, snippets of Jayne Cortez and Pat Parker, even a mischievous Gucci Mane sample she uses to tease herself. These aren’t just flourishes; they’re signposts of a mind refusing to stay in one place.
Vocally, she’s never sounded so unbound. keiyaA’s voice bends, scats, and glitches like she’s trying to out-sing gravity itself. Her Auto-Tuned runs aren’t about perfection—they’re about propulsion, each note pushing against the world’s squeeze. On “break it,” she wields that power like a weapon (“I dare a bitch to say sumn”), and by “this time,” featuring RahRah Gabor, she’s dismissing exes like they’re overdue invoices. But Hooke’s Law isn’t just catharsis; it’s confrontation. “I didn’t come to dance, I came to fight,” she sings on “fire sign oath,” her voice riding jungle breaks that threaten to combust. Even when she softens, she never fully lets go of the tension—it’s the tension that keeps her alive.
That tug between collapse and composure is the album’s heartbeat. On “stupid prizes,” she calls herself “queen of the night,” a monarch of insomnia who finds beauty in exhaustion. “Do I wanna die or am I just hungry?” she deadpans on “get close 2 me,” turning existential despair into a punchline. The humor doesn’t undercut the pain—it reframes it, giving her control over it. Every time she breaks her own tension, it’s like watching a spring snap back into place.
Her romantic detours bring both reprieve and recoil. “motions” glides on buttery grooves, her voice drunk on momentary freedom, while the acapella reprise feels like a self-aware exhale. Elsewhere, the push-pull becomes claustrophobic—“be quiet!!!” captures the loneliness of self-imposed silence, a plea for space that turns into an echo chamber. On “think about it/what u think?” she questions a hookup’s sincerity mid-flirt, playfully demanding honesty before surrender. keiyaA’s humor is sly, but her curiosity is sincere—she’s always testing elasticity: how far a person, a sound, or a heart can bend before it breaks.
By the album’s end, she’s still stretching. “lateeee” unfurls like a late-night mantra, a whispered act of defiance: I’m blessed to conspire another day. In a world that keeps compressing her, keiyaA refuses to flatten. She doesn’t seek neat resolutions or spiritual tidy-ups; she seeks motion. The album’s chaos is its comfort—a sonic proof that the only way out is through, preferably with bass rattling the floor.
Hooke’s Law isn’t healing music—it’s survival music. It’s the sound of someone laughing through tears, smoking through stress, twerking through trauma, and making art from the spring-loaded mess of being alive.
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