SassyBlack is a Seattle artist who has been at her solo career for about seven years now, releasing mostly shorter projects (EPs, singles, beat tapes, etc.) at a steady pace the entire time. Case in point, a little over a month after her last short experimental release, she is now back with an EP, BLK.

One of the interesting things about the way SassyBlack works is that when the music comes in smaller batches at a steady pace, you don’t necessarily clock the ways that she’s grown and improved and expanded her sound over the years. Then, one day, you go back and listen to an earlier EP and then listen to BLK, and you’re just like, “Wow!” This isn’t to bag on Sassy Black’s earlier material – it still holds up. This is to say, however, that you can’t pin her sound down or predict what her next project might sound like the way you could back in 2015. That’s because she’s been focused and driven over the last seven years and always learning and improving, and now, when she drops a project like BLK, you can hear all sorts of subtleties to the production and vocals and lyrics that just take everything up a notch. On the most basic level, we have to give props to Sassy Black for pulling off the feat of releasing an EP during Black History Month that celebrates Blackness across six songs, and manages to never sound to cheesy or just “Hooray for Everything!” She does this in a few different ways, but mainly through the sincereness of her lyrics and her determination to not just give us cliché slogans, but also because the production and her vocals are so engaging on a musical level. Your ears have a lot of work to do to keep up with Sassy Black. On the production side of things, it’s compelling the way that she’s clearly studied music across the diaspora, and drawing on rhythms that draw on Black music from multiple continents, all while not making a big show of it. On top of all this, Sassy Black also deploys a secret weapon in the form of the poetry of J. Ivy, who guests on “I Am Enough.” He provides just the right flavor to the project with his words and his delivery to take everything up a notch.

BLK is an excellent EP from Sassy Black. It accomplishes the task at hand, which is to celebrate Blackness, with a lot of fun songs that avoid the pitfalls of cliché phrasing. That’s because Sassy Black continues to do the work to make her music special, and it paid off here.