Selah Sue is an artist from Belgium who released her debut self-titled album back in 2011 to much acclaim in Europe. She built upon that success with her sophomore album, Reason, in 2015. Now, after a seven-year hiatus, Selah Sue returns with her third full-length album, Persona.

As the opening track, “Kingdom,” slowly builds to a crescendo before dropping the beat and Selah Sue starts rhyming, it becomes clear that Selah Sue is not messing around with her return to the spotlight. It’s a bold and aggressive track that begs to have the volume turned up and will definitely have you excited to get into the rest of the album. From there, Selah Sue takes us through quite the musical journey, giving us plenty of neo-soul, along with some disco, hip hop, dance music, pop, and classic soul. There are a lot of twists and turns to the album, but Selah Sue does a great job in giving herself enough space to explore all of the musical styles and expressions that she wanted to include on the album, and she does a great job of sequencing the album so that each song feels like each song is in conversation with the last. What makes it all work is Selah Sue’s honest and personal lyricism, and her confidence on the mic. She sings more than she raps on the album, but when she picks her moments to spit some rhymes, she sounds like she can hang with anyone, such as Mick Jenkins, who guests on “Celebrate.” As a vocalist, she’s drawing upon influences like Erykah Badu, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Amy Winehouse, using a less-is-more approach to her melodies, and balancing influences of jazz, soul, and hip hop. While she practices restraint most of the time she’s singing, she does have another gear in her back pocket, and she can really belt out to great effect when she wants to, such as on “All the Way Down,” when she adds some grit and puts some stank on it when the music builds to a climax. When you bring all of these pieces together, you get a really well-rounded album from a woman who has really come into her own as an artist, confident in her abilities, knowing just when to deploy all of the different tools she has at her disposal. The result is an album that is deeply personal, musically adventurous, and hella fun to listen to.

Selah Sue took some time before coming back with her third full-length album, and she made sure she got it right when it was finally time to release it. Persona is the album that she’s been building to for the last ten years, with all of her experience and her skill coming together to propel her further than she’s ever gone before.