On this tightly curated EP, the insightful R&B singer revises the elements intrinsic to her work, providing new meditations on Blackness, womanhood, and love.
Last year’s grief compounded by the ever present horrors of systemic racial violence seemingly turned everyone into a sage of their own experience. And so what of artists who were preternaturally revealing and insightful, before the world split wide open? Artists like Mereba, whose previous work has intentionally leaned towards transformation and vulnerability: Her sleeper hit “Black Truck” could have been a foreshadowing of all the havoc and the personal and communal revelations that people shared and prayed over in 2020. On AZEB, her latest EP, she’s back with soulful, well-paced verses that soften the existential and painfully direct inquiries she makes of her listeners.
“World feels like a war/Tell me what living’s for/Baby it’s gotta be love,” are the first lines off the EP’s quiet but persistent single, “Rider.” With a video starring Black lovers and friends traveling across arid plains, windswept and reckless, the song lunges for the healing power of intimacy. Even when a community is faced with violence, love for ourselves and our own has kept us, if not alive, then tender and open to the possibilities of rebirth. On “Rider,” Mereba delivers a striking rendition of the fine balance that Black people daily juggle; as we fight to assert and remember that we matter, we are also falling in love and lust, dealing with the dramas of fickle hearts and losing ourselves in the sensuality of those who make us feel safe and cared for. If anything, AZEB’s overarching theme is that with the world at war, love will have to matter so much more for most of us to come out alive.
On “Beretta,” over strumming guitar and lightly layered vocal riffs, the Alabama-born singer, who was raised across the U.S. and in Ethiopia, sings of a love that moves mountains solely in its reciprocity. “Baby boy let’s stick up the world for this cheddar/I’m the getaway and you’re the Beretta/We are renegades/The blood of the brave in our DNA,” with a well-timed emphasis punctuating the last word with ellipsis, and then an exclamation point—continuous and absolute. Like Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA,” Mereba posits that courage and survival are part of the Black lineage, while simultaneously beckoning to the ride-or-die bond of Jazmine Sullivan’s “#HoodLove”; she’s loyal to her person as they move through the world, carrying just the necessities they need to live and be loved. On “Beretta,” Mereba also returns to the jagged pain of “Rider,” but this time with a promise, singing, “I would win a war for this one/’Cause it’s love.” In the subtle ways she ties her songs to each other, Mereba shows herself to be a storyteller, approaching her work as a singular, but expanding range of thoughts, voices and movements.