Keiyaa Breaks Down 12 Perfectly Produced Songs
The R&B innovator dissects tracks by faves including Britney Spears, Brandy, and Nine Inch Nails, explaining how they inspired the sound of her brilliant 2025 album ‘Hooke’s Law.’
The Producers is an interview series where our favorite artists discuss their favorite music production.
Whenever I press play on Keiyaa’s largely self-produced 2020 debut Forever, Ya Girl, a cult classic of modern alternative R&B, I’m always bowled over by how her beats can be so full and so brittle at the same time as they breathe life into her stories of romance and Black femme reclamation. Built from stacked synths and sampled loops, her production can be spacey, soulful, or deep-fried for your local underground rap beat set as needed. On Forever, Ya Girl, these sonic and emotional threads bound together to form a patchwork tapestry of a Black twentysomething who knew every nigga was a star and was determined to shine bright through all her troubles. Her recent sophomore album Hooke’s Law—named for the law of physics directly tying an object’s force of movement to how much it’s being compressed or stretched—charts out her next steps, in all their confidence and anxiety.
“Something I learned between Forever, Ya Girl and Hooke’s Law is that there’s no #healed,” Keiyaa says. “Forever was so successful, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I fucking did it. I healed, and here’s my reward for being healed,’ right? But Hooke’s Law immediately says, ‘Nope, life doesn’t work like that.’” There’s been plenty of heartbreak, trauma, and musical metamorphosis to unpack in the five years between albums, but the increased ambition that comes from making such a splash on your first try made her even bolder behind the mic and the boards.
“Devotions,” a bouncy highlight on Hooke’s Law, is a perfect example of the album’s fuller and moodier palette, the syrupy bass and strobing synths that define the second half doing all it can to rock the boat. The beats for three other standouts, “Make Good,” “Lateeee,” and “Motions,” were all made in the same weekend as she was processing several situationships, and one particularly serious relationship that had gone south. She began incorporating early demos of these songs into her live show, and, combined with the creative spark that came from her recent stageplay Milk Thot, the rest of Hooke’s Law came together shortly after. The album also incorporates some new musical elements into Keiyaa’s style: jungle, drum’n’bass, flecks of industrial and post-rock, trilling flutes, and slatherings of T-Pain and Kanye-indebted Auto-Tune.
While most of Forever was composed with a Roland SP-404 sampler and a MicroKORG synthesizer, Keiyaa made Hooke’s Law with a much wider array of tools: the Octatrack sampler, a modular synthesizer with custom sound patches, and the digital audio workstation Ableton for virtual instruments, drums, and post-production work. Mixed in with the aqueous R&B and beat-scene rhythms from the first phase of her career, Hooke’s Law is charged with enough pent-up energy to slingshot a boulder around the sun. Here, Keiyaa breaks down some of the sounds and songs that influenced its creation.
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