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Instant Vintage: These Songs Are For Anyone Sick Of Earth – Aliah Sheffield

An eight-track record by a singer who went viral for a song about wanting to leave the planet. It is funnier, sadder and better made than the internet moment suggested.

These Songs Are For Anyone Sick Of Earth

Aliah Sheffield broke through with "Earth Is Ghetto" — a song that took off on TikTok on the strength of a sentiment a great many people apparently shared, expressed in a chorus about wanting to go home to a planet she does not come from.

What got lost in the virality is that it is a genuinely well-made record. The joke is real, but so is the melancholy underneath it, and the vocal arrangement — layered, gospel-inflected, harmonically ambitious — is the work of someone with serious training and taste. This project builds an entire short album around that combination of humour and exhaustion.

What to listen for

Read the tracklist as a sequence and the concept becomes clear: "Earth Is Ghetto," "Some Of Your People," "Boo Boo The Fool," "I Don't Like People," "Never Drinking Again," "Good For The Money," "Anti-Hero." It is a record about being tired of other human beings, and it is committed enough to the bit to be genuinely affecting.

"Boo Boo The Fool" is the sharpest piece of writing — the title is African-American vernacular for a person being played for an idiot, and the song is about refusing that role. "I Don't Like People" is the most direct.

"Never Drinking Again" handles a very familiar subject with more musical interest than it needs. "Anti-Hero" closes on the self-assessment the whole record has been circling.

Throughout, listen to the background vocals. Sheffield stacks harmonies densely, and a lot of the record's emotional weight is carried in parts that are not the lead line.

Go deeper

Follow her own subsequent releases — the trajectory of an artist who arrives through a viral moment is always worth watching, and the ones who survive it are the ones with actual catalogue.

For artists working the same seam of humour and melancholy in R&B: Yaya Bey is the best of them, Liv.e the most experimental, and Doechii the one who took the combination furthest commercially.

And on the wider point — Black artists writing about wanting to be somewhere other than here has a long and rich lineage. Sun Ra built an entire cosmology on it, Parliament built a mythology, and Janelle Monáe built a discography. "Earth Is Ghetto" is a TikTok song in the Afrofuturist tradition, whether it meant to be or not.

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