The two most recent installments of Psalm One’s self-released Woman @ Work series confirm that these collections are all of a piece. At the moment, I feel I may have reviewed her first entry in haste. I wasn’t as aware of the ways in which evaluating it individually without fully processing the subsequent releases would turn an ongoing dialogue about working through childhood, self-image, interpersonal relationships, and professional aspirations into fragments. Thus I’ll be reviewing 500 Bars and the third volume together.

500 Bars begins and ends with Psalm fielding questions from a male interviewer. At the beginning, he asks why she and DJ Jay Illa lift samples incorporated into better-known contemporary music, to which Psalm replies that it depends on how she feels about the song, but sometimes a decision is as simple as being enamored with a tune or a beat and wanting to use it too. With that sentiment, she launches into the titular 500 bars a 28-minute jam over Illa’s deft weaving of tracks like T.I.’s “What You Know” and Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One,” which themselves sample Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe,” Roberta Flack’s cover of the Impressions’ “Gone Away,” and a remix of Justice’s “D.A.N.C.E.”

Much of Psalm’s lyrics boast her prowess on the mic. She bites from Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face” to proclaim that she’s not bluffing, so she’s not a muffin. Psalm’s flow strolls with the assured cadence of a skilled wordsmith, making casually dropped lines like “write a good rhyme and my ‘giny starts secreting,” and “sitting on your face so I’m over your head” such a thrill to hear, perhaps serving as a counter to a history of male MCs’ drawing rhetorical attention toward their potent sexuality or vaunted skills with female conquests, issues she underlines explicitly on volume three’s “Brown Ambition.” Dropping references to Sister Act’s Mary Clarence, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Fey, Whitney Houston, and A Different World’s Whitley Gilbert and Denise Huxtable further contextualize her relationship to being a woman in the entertainment industry. She makes it sound easy, but she always foregrounds how hard she’s had to work to get here.

However, I don’t want to dwell on her gender or sex as proof of her exceptionalism – her talent indicates that alone across binaries. What I instead want to suggest is that Psalm’s most profound lyrics come from personal experiences and insights which are often refracted by the lens of gender, sex, race, and class. This seems to be something that she’s aware of herself, as she closes 500 Bars by answering an interview question about how she feels about serving as a female role model, reflecting on how she wants to serve as a positive example for her fans as a woman, a rapper, and in the places where these identities intersect.

Volume three lacks the cohesion of the first two entries. However, it’s no less accessible and the first four songs rank among her best. “Ginsu Knives” is a killer opener with Del offering a guest verse. It’s followed by “Heaven in Your Drink,” a wrenching story from Psalm’s youth about a clandestine date gone afoul by street violence. “Top Bottom” foregrounds Psalm’s swagger with great lines like “if I don’t make your top ten that’s all right – I’ll make my own” and “if we gotta marginalize than you gotta mention me,” a sassy rebuttal to labels like “female rapper” and “femme c.” Like “Heaven in Your Drink” and much of volume one’s introspective material, “South Side Lady” works a bittersweet soul sample. Over this, Psalm intimates about coming of age in Chicago, weaving universal anxieties around adolescent bodies and peer identification with the specificity of her surroundings. In addition, “Flirt With Your Race” interrogates race relations by wanting to think beyond them in personal interactions that doesn’t espouse post-racial politics or colorblindness and “Tonic” poses as a slinky club track while lampooning those conventions.

Apart from Del, notables guests include “ Fluffy’s return on “Snatch,” and Psalm’s mom gushing about her daughter’s accomplishments in “Psalmie.” Like 500 Bars, volume three is festooned with contemporary samples, many of which also are derived from pre-existent works. Rihanna’s “Shut Up And Drive” drives the melody to “F-ck Up Your Life,” as does Kelis’s “Bossy” on “Psalmie,” and R. Kelly’s “I’m a Flirt” for “Flirt With Your Race.” Missy Elliott’s “Pass That Dutch” propels the song of same name here. As with volume one, a few samples come from movies like Mr. and Mrs. Smith and Anchorman, most pointedly Veronica Corningstone’s line about working harder than her male colleagues to be successful in a man’s world that leads into “Brown Ambition.”

I read these samples as a clear indication that Psalm has the charisma and skill to be capture wider mainstream attention instead of underground hip hop’s worst-kept secret. As she rightly proclaims in “Pass That Dutch,” “there won’t be another Lauryn.” How glad I am that there’s a Psalm One.