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Yebba VibeZ

Yebba sings like the last thirty years of R&B did not happen and she is still working from the source material. Eighteen tracks of a genuinely extraordinary instrument.

West Memphis to everywhere

Abbey Smith — Yebba, her first name reversed — is from West Memphis, Arkansas, and came up singing in church. She became known through a live performance of "My Mind" at Sofar Sounds in 2016: an entirely improvised, unaccompanied song, recorded on a phone camera, that circulated among musicians until essentially everyone in the industry had seen it.

What people responded to was not just the range, considerable as it is, but the control — the ability to move between a whisper and a full belt within a phrase, and to place notes with the precision of a jazz singer. Her mother died by suicide shortly before that period, and a great deal of her subsequent work has dealt with grief directly.

Her debut album Dawn arrived in 2021, produced largely with Mark Ronson, and won a Grammy.

What to listen for

"My Mind" is the origin story and still the best single demonstration of what she does. "One More Smile" live at Electric Lady is the other essential — a performance recorded in Hendrix's studio, and one of the most affecting things in recent soul music.

"Distance" and "Where Do You Go" are the Dawn highlights, and "Evergreen" and "Paranoia Purple" show the album's stranger, jazzier corners.

The features are a who's-who and a good measure of her standing among musicians. Robert Glasper's "Over," Lucky Daye's "How Much Can A Heart Take," PJ Morton's live "How Deep Is Your Love," Ed Sheeran's "Best Part of Me," Sam Smith's "No Peace," and Drake's "Yebba's Heartbreak" — a track on Certified Lover Boy that is essentially just her.

"Far Away" with A$AP Rocky is the most unexpected pairing here and works better than it should.

Go deeper

Dawn (2021) is the album, and it is named for her mother.

Her live recordings are where the real evidence is — the Electric Lady sessions and the various Sofar and Tiny Desk-adjacent performances. This is a singer whose records, good as they are, undersell her.

For the lineage: Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway are the obvious names, and Hathaway's Live is the record her performances most resemble in spirit. Among contemporaries, Lianne La Havas, Jazmine Sullivan and Samara Joy are the singers operating at a comparable technical level.

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