Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

Conceived and first composed on her laptop at home, with some vocals recorded in her bathroom, Erykah Badu's New Amerykah Part Two is lo-fi and highly sophisticated—exquisitely analogue and experimentally techy.

Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part Two is lo-fi and highly sophisticated—exquisitely analogue and experimentally techy. It begins with a radio signal tuning in, and it asks its listener to participate in their own process of attunement, to listen to familiar sounds anew, and open ourselves to an alternate Amerykah. An organism at once cohesive and discordant, it flows, jams, grooves, bounces. It transforms.

Placing Badu in an intertextual constellation of artists and critics from Stevie Wonder, to Amiri Baraka, to Alice Coltrane, Kameryn Alexa Carter explores whether neo-soul is dead, acknowledges Baduizm as a potent form of Black female spirituality, and tunes into Badu’s “freakquencies”, taking the reader through a series of synesthetic dream sequences as she revisits the album again and again.