After years of drought, Asa has finally given us new music. Teasing her new material on Twitter last week was enough to cause a rapturous excitement, and had people like me literally counting down to 14/05. Today, Asa dropped a YouTube link to the video of The Beginning, which we have ravenously consumed as a snippet. ”Here is to you, “The Beginning” for me a reset, a rebirth. I hope you would love it as much as I do. Thank you all for your love and patience.” Asa tweeted.
That she acknowledged that we’ve been patient for something new from her is cute. The Beginning, according to her tweet, is the opening track to an upcoming album and it ticks off the elements that makes Asa unparalleled and vocally gifted. Humming over a piano-laced intro, Asa’s raspy vocals is only briefly haunting as she sings about being abandoned in a relationship after a conflict, and wanting to make amends by starting over.
”When you said goodbye with a smile on your face,” she sings, ”I thought it was usual you’d be gone for a little while. I didn’t see it coming when someone told me I’d be waiting for years.”
The video shows how abandoned she is, wandering in the empty space of a building draped with sheets of plastic nylons, an empty bedroom where she idles about in a bathrobe, and a darkened void where she sits forlornly in a chair reminiscent of that Black Museum episode in Black Mirror, the story of a dead woman brought to life via some cool implant inserted in her husband’s head.
But I digress. Towards the end, The Beginning slowly shakes off its melancholy by being hopeful and spirited. You hear it in Asa’s voice, the promise of something stirringly new, almost like it’s a love letter to us. Whether this track opener will be thematically consistent with other tracks of the album is difficult to answer. But who cares? The Beginning is a gift and lets all luxuriate in it.
When Bernard Dayo isn’t writing about pop culture, he’s watching horror movies and reading comics and trying to pretend his addiction to Netflix isn’t a serious condition.
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