On her expansive new album Water Made Us, Chicago musician

and poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks the question, what does it

mean to fully surrender into love? Across Water Made Us, Jamila embraces

new genres, playful melodies, and hypnotizing wordplay, as she wades

through the exhilarating tumult of love's wreckage and refuge.

While 2017's HEAVN saw Jamila celebrating her community

within a lineage of Black feminist movement organizing, and 2019's Legacy!

Legacy! Reframed her life's experiences through the storied personas of iconic

Black and brown artists, Water Made Us is self-revelatory in an entirely new

way, making this her most personal album yet. Made together with LAbased producer McClenney, and boasting features from longtime friends

and Chicago natives such as Saba and Peter CottonTale, Water Made Us is

a sprawling and intimate portrait of self-reflection, cleverly designed to echo

the different stages of a relationship: the early days of easy compromising,

flirtatiousness, and fun; the careful negotiation through moments of conflict

or hurt; the grieving of something lost; and the tender realization at the end of

it all that the person who is gone never really leaves, but stays with you as you

find yourself ready to try again, refreshed and reassured.

The album's title - taken from a line in album highlight "Good

News" - is a subtle reference to the famous Toni Morrison quote "All water

has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was." It's

this sentiment - of memory, place, and returning - that acts as a pillar for the

album's arc. Water Made Us reminds us that at it's best love is a warm, still

ocean. Deep, shimmering, and endless in it's wonder. And at it's worst love can

be a riptide that takes us so far away from ourselves we can hardly find our

way back, hardly even remember how to swim. And yet Jamila surrenders to

this surf - every wave and undertow - because maybe even the most painful

endings can in fact be an invitation that calls her back home, back to shore,

back to herself.