Yaya Bey - Remember Your North Star (LP) - Crystal Blue Vinyl

Yaya Bey’s Remember Your North Star arrived in 2022 on Big Dada with the kind of quiet confidence that creeps up on you. It’s a record built for close listens, not because it’s fussy, but because it’s intimate. Her voice sits right up close to the mic, conversational and confiding, then it breaks into melody that feels like sunlight after rain. The sound palette draws from dusty soul, laid back RnB, a little lovers rock sway, and hip hop’s ear for negative space. What you get is a vibe that’s soft around the edges yet razor sharp in its writing, the sort of album you keep flipping back to, just to live in the room it creates.

Bey has a knack for turning diary entries into songs, so nothing here feels like a posture. She writes about love and sex, about money and work, and about the specific weather of moving through the world as a Black woman. The hooks arrive casually, like a friend telling a story that slowly becomes a chorus. It’s also structured like a conversation, with short interludes that shift the temperature and keep the flow moving without dead air. That looseness suits her, because the album feels more like a suite than a set of singles, even though there are cuts that jump out straight away.

Take Keisha, a fan favourite that rides a low-slung groove and a hook that sticks. Bey threads humour into her candour, the way classic RnB used to do, but she never blunts the truth. Elsewhere she lets the drums breathe and the bass carry the mood, and she’ll drop into near-spoken phrasing before gliding back into melody. You hear echoes of Solange’s minimalism and Erykah Badu’s conversational cool, but Bey isn’t doing pastiche. She narrows the frame, keeps the arrangement simple, and lets the writing land.

Production-wise, Remember Your North Star favours warm keys, close-miked percussion and bass lines that nod to dub. Nothing feels overly polished, which is part of the charm. You can hear fingers on strings, breaths between lines, a sense of players in a small room. That suits the album’s themes, because when she sings about care and desire and the economics of romance, the music keeps it human. It’s the sort of record that rewards being played front to back, late at night or early on a Sunday when the city’s still quiet.

The reception matched the quality. Critics praised its intimacy and clarity of vision, picking out the writing and the subtle production choices that keep you locked in. Fans gravitated to its honesty, and the songs found their way into year-end conversations. Bey followed with new work the next year, which felt like a continuation rather than a pivot, a sign that North Star was the start of a long run rather than a one-off.

If you’re thinking about Remember Your North Star vinyl, you’re on the right track. This is a record that blossoms on wax, the low end fills the room and the small details sit just right across two sides. Yaya Bey vinyl does well in the shop bins here, partly because the album invites that start to finish listen that suits the format. If you like browsing a Melbourne record store and letting the artwork and the aura of a sleeve pull you in, this one rewards the pick up. And if you’re hunting from home, you can buy Yaya Bey records online easily enough, which is handy if you’re building a lean RnB shelf and want something that holds its own next to Solange or Cleo Sol. Among Yaya Bey albums on vinyl, this sits as the essential entry point, the one that crystallised her strengths for a wider audience.

I keep coming back to the way the record makes small moments feel significant. A tossed-off line lands like a thesis, a two-minute tune sketches a whole relationship in the way the bass and vocal lean into each other. There’s no bloat, no need to announce its importance. It just is, which is rarer than it should be. For anyone trawling through vinyl records Australia wide, or just lining up something honest and lived-in for the turntable, Remember Your North Star is an easy recommendation. It feels personal without being closed off, stylish without fuss, and rooted in craft that never calls attention to itself. That balance is its secret, and why it already feels like a modern favourite.