On ‘YEARNALISM,’ her third album, Baby Rose rejects nonchalance and turns raw desire into some of the most affecting R&B of the year
The great trick of Baby Rose’s third album is hiding in its invented title. Yearnalism, as the Atlanta-based singer defines it, is the practice and documentation of desire in all its forms: for love, for freedom, for the things you cannot have. In an era when romantic culture has curdled into app-swiping and performative nonchalance, releasing a 12-song R&B record that treats wanting as a discipline is practically a protest gesture. She has said it plainly enough herself: “If you’re coming into my court, you’re coming to yearn.”
What makes the manifesto land is the instrument delivering it. Rose, born Jasmine Rose Wilson and raised between Washington, D.C. and Fayetteville, North Carolina, possesses one of the most singular contraltos in contemporary music, a smoke-cured voice that draws constant comparisons to Nina Simone, Etta James, and Tracy Chapman without actually sounding like any of them.
Her first two albums, 2019’s To Myself and 2023’s Through and Through, sometimes felt like settings built around that voice. YEARNALISM is the first record that fully activates it, matching the instrument to a subject, longing itself, that the R&B tradition was practically invented to explore.
Built Rough on Purpose
The album’s textures explain a lot about its power. Working with co-executive producer BIAKO, Rose whittled the record down from roughly 70 sketches, and she famously cut her vocals on an ancient microphone never intended for singing. When the team re-tracked takes on better equipment, the polish killed the feeling, and she scrapped them, concluding that “the first few takes are sacred.” You can hear that philosophy everywhere.
The arrangements blend soul, jazz, and gospel into something warm and slightly frayed at the edges, closer to a live room than a laptop. “Let Me Go” glides like a lost late-’70s soft rock single, layered backing vocals stacked like insulation, while “Sunday,” the album’s longest and starkest track, unfolds like a hungover morning slowly turning redemptive, porch soul that briefly flares into blues-rock before settling again.
The duets are the record’s emotional load-bearing walls. “Is This Love,” with the British soul singer Elmiene, is all suspended animation, two voices circling a question neither will answer. “Friends Again,” with Leon Thomas, is tougher, an old-school ballad about whether one night ruined a friendship worth more than romance, ending not with a hook but with plain, unsung speech. It is the boldest choice on the album and its most devastating.
The Payoff of Going First
Context sharpens the achievement. Rose arrives at this record fresh off her first Grammy, earned in the Best R&B Album category for her contribution to Thomas’ MUTT, and YEARNALISM plays like an artist cashing in a decade of credibility on her own terms. The songs refuse tidy endings. They linger in the transitional spaces between relationships, treating regret and desire as two sides of one coin, and closer “Jasmine’s Sonnet” turns the address inward, a benediction sung to the younger self she nearly lost along the way.
If there is a limitation, it is that the album’s commitment to slow-burn intimacy leaves its few uptempo moments, like the Philly soul flourish of “All My Love,” feeling almost like guests at their own party. But that is the cost of a record this dedicated to a single feeling, examined from every angle. YEARNALISM makes vulnerability sound less like weakness than like nerve. In a landscape of artists too cool to want anything out loud, Baby Rose went first, and she made wanting sound like the whole point.
