U.K.-native singer-songwriter Yola has announced the coming release of new album Stand For Myself and shared a music video for the album’s first single, “Diamond Studded Shoes”.
The Dan Auerbach-produced Stand For Myself is due for a July 30th, 2021 release via Easy Eye Sound. A sonic shift from her debut full-length, 2019’s multiple Grammy-nominated Walk Through Fire, Stand For Myself features an eclectic mix of “symphonic soul and classic pop.”
As Yola explains of the new album in a press release, “It’s a collection of stories of allyship, black feminine strength through vulnerability, and loving connection from the sexual to the social. All celebrating a change in thinking and paradigm shift at their core. It is an album not blindly positive and it does not simply plead for everyone to come together. It instead explores ways that we need to stand for ourselves throughout our lives, what limits our connection as humans and declares that real change will come when we challenge our thinking and acknowledge our true complexity.”
Yola’s aspiration is that the album will encourage empathy and self-actualization, about getting back to the “real” Yola. As the artist explains, “I kind of got talked out of being me, and now I’m here. This is who I’ve always been in music and in life. There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed out of my own majesty, but a bitch is back.”
To help herald the announcement of the new LP, Yola has released its unifying lead single, “Diamond Studded Shoes”, and a surreal music video to go along with it. As Yola explains of “Diamond Studded Shoes”, “This song explores the false divides created to distract us from those few who are in charge of the majority of the world’s wealth and use the ‘divide and conquer’ tactic to keep it. This song calls on us to unite and turn our focus to those with a stranglehold on humanity.”
The charmingly stylized video, directed by Kwaku Otchere, flips back and forth between a variety of whimsical, colorful depictions of Yola as she belts out lyrics like “Fight, for the life and the soul of the world we love / Fight, cause the promise is never gonna be enough.”
As Yola adds about the clip, “The video is in part inspired by [The Truman Show] and is about being trapped in a false construct. It is supposedly perfect, but you’re trapped in a life that wasn’t meant for you. I wanted to convey the feeling that everything you know to be true is not quite working the way it’s supposed to. The island at the end is a paradigm of mental conditioning, we are all trapped on an island of our own thinking, until we change it.”
Watch the video for the new Yola single “Diamond Studded Shoes” below. To stream the track on the platform of your choice or pre-order your copy of Stand For Myself, click here.
Yola – “Diamond Studded Shoes” (Official Music Video)
[Video: Easy Eye Sound]
In addition to the announcement of Stand For Myself and the release of “Diamond Studded Shoes”, Yola announced on Thursday that she will appear this summer at both the Newport Folk Festival and the Newport Jazz Festival. She is also set to support Chris Stapleton on a number of national tour dates later this year and early next year.
See below for a full list of upcoming Yola tour dates. For ticketing info, head to her website here.
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