Joy Oladokun’s new album is called “Hope is a Heavy Thing.” And to my ears, it’s a culminating work. She’s decisively and vividly laying out her ethic, outlook and identity as an artist.
I’ve watched her build her career in Nashville and documented her journey from obscurity to the initial recognition of her songwriting promise and the remarkable work she’s done in the spotlight. And all along, she’s charted her own path and tended to her own development. She hasn’t been terribly interested in letting the industry mold her, aware that it can be limiting or can turn exploitative.
At times, I’ve seen her claimed, categorized and interpreted in ways she never really asked to be.
Though she didn’t set out to join the country music world so much as work alongside it — always on her own terms — some held her up as an emblem of the country music industry’s progress in the wake of the national Black Lives Matter reckoning of 2020. She was one of a number of Nashville-based, Black artists signed by labels at that time.
But that was short-lived.
By the time she released her 2024 album, “Observations from a Crowded Room,” she’d been dropped. I have a clear memory of the Ryman Auditorium release show where she stood on stage and spoke to how performative she felt those signings probably were in the first place.
Joy’s now with a new label, Concord, and on “Hope is a Heavy Thing,” she pays no particular mind to expectations. First and foremost, she’s still a singer-songwriter, and one with specific gifts: a sensitive and righteous witness who welcomes her listeners into her empathetic and introverted perspective, who has a way of illuminating emotional truths that could otherwise go unrecognized. But she’s also the primary producer of this music, and she’s come into her own as a self-sufficient sonic architect, playing with sampling and beatmaking and crafting songs as hooky, magnetic, and rhythmically compelling as anything she’s done to date.
What’s newly front and center is that she is a music head on a mission — an artist with the vision to draw on the affective power and resistance potential of a myriad forms of pop music that she’s loved, absorbed, and learned from. She journeys through those familiar pop forms without being tethered to their rules, and helps us hear them differently.
She’s situated this album at a specific point in her semi-public existence: it arrives after she’s already offered the world years of stirring work, and given so much of herself in the process. And she’s ready to acknowledge the toll of that creative labor.
In her song, “Easy Company,” she invokes the revolutionary Nigerian artist Fela Kuti, both by name and example. It feels like she’s creating a fortress against life-stealing forces with her vocal phrasing and the hypnotic magnetic pull of the sinuous polyrhythmic groove. In that space, she can regather her strength. “Doomsday dancing sounds like a good plan to me,” she sings. “Come tomorrow, I’ll be everything you need.”
In the song “Zombie,” Joy depicts what it’s like to absorb the reality of human suffering and carry that weight around, and how it can make you feel incapable of experiencing pleasure and delight. At first, the song sounds plaintive and unadorned, but the more she describes feeling alienated from the bliss that everyone else seems to be feeling around her, the busier the track gets with halting break beats and synth pads.
During an acoustic set at Americana Fest, she improvised a mashup of her “Zombie” and the Cranberries’ keening, ’90s Irish alt-rock “Zombie,” pairing two very tonally different meditations on how completely human horrors can dominate the imagination.
She also maps her own broad creative foundations in the song “Sage,” featuring Nigerian artist Adekunde Gold, by pointing to the lineages of truth-telling folk singer-songwriters and of unapologetic and innovative Nigerian musical visionaries.
And she finds plenty to echo, invoke and amend in pop music forms. Take “TOGIAIM.” (This stands for The Only God in America is Money.) In that song, she sounds both grieved and riled as she contemplates how the youthful idealism of 1960s music burned so bright, then faded, only to be replaced by the pursuit of capitalist comforts.
“Woodstock was just a fever dream, the garden’s gone,” she laments.
In the mildly psychedelic, sunshine pop-rock tune “Die Young” Joy summons the mythology around rock icons who burned hot and blazed out quickly. As much as their short lives are romanticized, she suggests, that’s less appealing than living a long, settled life, finding companionship, contentment, and, hopefully, rest.
And in the song, “Don’t Call Me Baby,” invokes ’60s girl groups whose expression was only recognized as radical in hindsight. At a time when much of the world dismissed teen girls as frivolous, they insisted that their inner lives, longings, and emotional wounds mattered. By updating that classic style, Joy reaffirms her own authority to articulate her desires.
The most subtle surprise on her new album is her arrival at a moment quiet clarity in the song “Kind,” a blend of pop and neo-soul. It opens with a chipmunk-style sample of the ’70s soul song “They Said it Couldn’t Be Done,” reveling in an unlikely couple making it work. Joy, on the other hand, is in the role of a partner who’s realized that she is seen as the gentle one, and quite possibly taken for granted. And she’s worked her way to insisting that it would be a mistake to take her kindness for weakness.
In a way, that applies to how we understand Joy Oladokun’s artistry too. She’s not only one of pop and folk songwriting’s great chroniclers of vulnerable humanity, she’s a visionary who shouldn’t ever be underestimated.
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