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Jamila Woods- HEAVN

Seventeen tracks from a Chicago poet's first album — a record that treats self-preservation as a political act and Chicago as a character.

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Jamila Woods: HEAVN (2016)

Jamila Woods came to music through poetry and through teaching: she was closely involved with Young Chicago Authors, the organisation behind the youth open-mic scene that also produced Chance the Rapper, Noname and Saba. HEAVN is her first album and it is unmistakably the work of a writer.

The record's subject is Black women's interiority and survival, and its method is to build songs out of borrowed fragments — playground rhymes, hymns, a Paula Cole hook, the Cure — reassembled so that familiar material carries entirely new weight.

It is also a Chicago record in the most specific way. Streets, lake water, neighbourhood names and local organisations appear throughout, and the album functions partly as a map.

What to listen for

"Blk Girl Soldier" is the centrepiece and the best place to start — a song that names Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells, Audre Lorde and Assata Shakur over a hard, minimal groove, and manages to be a history lesson and a banger at once.

"VRY BLK" with Noname is built on a schoolyard clapping rhyme, and the gap between the playfulness of the form and the content of the verses is the most effective thing on the record.

"Holy" is the album's thesis: a song about being alone that refuses to treat solitude as a deficiency.

"LSD" with Chance the Rapper is a love song to Lake Shore Drive, and "Emerald Street" with Saba is the other geographic one.

"Assata's Daughters" is named after a real Chicago organisation, and the interludes throughout are structural rather than filler.

"Stellar" and "Bubbles" are the prettiest things here, and "Way Up" is the most joyful.

Go deeper

LEGACY! LEGACY! (2019) is the follow-up and the better album — every track named after a Black or brown artist, from Zora Neale Hurston to Sun Ra, and written in conversation with them.

Her poetry collection HEAVN shares the album's concerns. For the Chicago scene: Noname's Telefone, Saba's CARE FOR ME and Ravyn Lenae's early EPs.

Listening note: the borrowed fragments are the method. Playground rhymes, hymns, a nineties pop hook and a post-punk guitar line all turn up recontextualised, and the effect is to make familiar material carry weight it was never built for. Once you start catching the sources, the album turns into a conversation rather than a collection.

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