Yola doesn’t make albums. She makes manifestos. Her 2021 record Stand for Myself sounds like a crate-digger’s fever dream—disco grooves, Britpop shimmer, doo-wop harmonies, a whisper of Smokey, a wail of Sister Rosetta—and that’s just side one.
“There was no checklist,” she says of the record’s wild genre buffet. “It’s just how we grew up in the UK. We didn’t have genre walls—we had a small island and one radio dial.”
It shows. The songs on Stand for Myself don’t jump between styles so much as dissolve borders entirely. “It’s not that I’m just across genres,” she says. “It’s that they flow into each other. I’m interested in the connective tissue.” The whole record is a rejection of musical silos, a self-made sonic ecosystem where disco can coexist with doo-wop and Britpop without anyone apologizing for the hustle.
Speaking of hustle—“Diamond Studded Shoes,” the album’s groove-laden protest anthem, is as subtle as a brick through a country club window.
“It’s all a trick, babes,” she says. “Divide and conquer politics are designed to make us fight each other so we don’t look up and see who’s really holding the puppet strings.”
Inspired by a drunken 2017 wine rant with Aaron Lee Tasjan (“We love Aaron Lee Tasjan!”), the song came together as they watched UK leaders preach austerity while drowning in designer labels. “Theresa May was giving a speech on how tough things were while wearing diamond-studded shoes. Like… we pay you, boo.”
But even when she’s dragging the oligarchs, Yola refuses to flatten her fire into a genre cliché. “This record isn’t political,” she insists. “It’s about the microcosm of your paradigm of thinking. If we can win the battle within, we can win the battle without.”
Poetry runs deep for her, thanks to a wise English teacher who told young Yola she was already a songwriter and just needed the right tools. “He said, ‘We’re going to get you into poetry so your songwriting is stronger.’ And I never forgot him.”
So yes, she’s made a timeless album full of soulful nuance and dancefloor truth bombs. But also, she’s playing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. And she means business.
“People say Ike Turner started rock. Babe—no. Sister Rosetta had the club. She had the night. Everyone came to see her. B.B. King. Elvis. Little Richard. She discovered Little Richard! Of course a man in full makeup and heels was discovered by a queer Black woman. A white guy wasn’t letting that happen in the ’50s.”
Her voice rises with every name, every layer of erasure peeled back. “Queer women were at the start of rock and roll. And the narrative’s been flattened. Baz wants to fix that. So do I.”
She’s not doing it alone. She’s part of a new collective consciousness that includes Allison Russell and Amethyst Kiah—sister spirits who orbit her both musically and literally. “I used to live with Allison. We moved but didn’t want to be too far apart. I’m trying to get Amethyst to move nearby too.”
Call it the anti-illusion-of-division squad. Call it the Empath Avengers. Just don’t try to box them in.
“We’re all about breaking the delusion of division,” Yola says. “It’s time to squad up.
Watch the interview above and then check out the videos below.
