Yaya Bey isn’t interested in quick catharsis. With “Raisins,” the third single from her upcoming album Do It Afraid, the Brooklyn-based artist continues to prove that she’s one of the most emotionally honest voices in soul music today. The video is less a visual companion to the song than a living, breathing photo album — textured, tender, and resolutely human. It’s the kind of work that doesn’t ask to be understood quickly. Instead, it invites you to sit with it, to feel your way through.
The track itself is a gentle meditation, underpinned by a dusty, analog warmth — the kind of sonic space where memory and melancholy live together. Bey’s voice is effortless but never casual. It’s intimate, cracked open just enough to let the light in. “Have you given up on that dream?” she sings, and in that one line, you feel the ache of Langston Hughes’ eternal question echoing through generations.
That reference — to Hughes’ “Harlem” — isn’t just window dressing. Bey folds it into her artistry like flour into dough. The song is about deferred dreams, yes, but also about the small rituals of care that make dreaming possible in the first place. The video shows this beautifully: braiding hair, brushing edges, sharing a porch and a dance. These are not just cultural markers — they’re acts of resistance, ways of affirming life in the face of generational fatigue.
There’s something sacred about the way the camera lingers — not in a voyeuristic sense, but with the respect of someone who knows these moments matter. It captures more than just aesthetics. It captures intention. And that’s the quiet revolution of Yaya Bey: she’s not just creating songs; she’s creating space. Emotional, spiritual, ancestral.
“Raisins” doesn’t try to resolve the tension between hope and despair. Instead, it offers surrender. “It’s me giving myself permission to dream,” Bey says in her press statement, and the clarity of that self-authorization is what gives the track its power. She’s not selling false optimism; she’s showing us the joy that exists in trying, even when the outcome is uncertain.
This song, like much of Bey’s work, refuses to be rushed. It rewards repeated listens. And as Do It Afraid approaches its June 20 release, “Raisins” stands as a quiet thesis statement — that in dreaming, in daring to imagine joy amid the weight of history, there is a radical kind of freedom.