Heather Victoria’s Latest Album Is a Concept That Defies Closure

When it comes to relationships, the kids are not alright.

America’s rightward shift has brought draconian relationship standards bubbling back up into the popsphere. Studies have shown that more and more young adults across gender identities are taking a break from sex and dating.

Socially repressive trends like tradwives (read: traditional wives) are proliferating on TikTok and Instagram. Podcasters increasingly segregate their target audiences by appealing to gender, from the Joe Rogan Experience and Art of Manliness to Giggly Squad and Call Her Daddy. Hell, Sabrina Carpenter can’t even get her hair pulled without internet backlash. Romantic relationships, in short, are an increasingly vexing thing for many young people today.

Heather Victoria, R&B songstress with the Raleigh-based Jamla Records, has something to say about our struggles to fall (and stay) in love. Her fifth studio album, I Can’t Make This Up, which dropped on Sept. 12, intercedes in the ever-declining discourse about romance.

More than a collection of insipid invectives for ex-lovers or declarations of head-over-heels eternal love, Heather V helps us untangle the toxicity of our relationships today by plunging us straight into the muck.

The album, a follow-up to her sonically adventurous Boutique Hotel (2019), emerged from the pandemic slowdown. The lockdowns began just a week after the end of Rapsody’s A Black Woman Created This tour, which brought Heather V to Amos’ Southend as an opening act on the penultimate tour stop. 

“Going straight from Boutique Hotel right into the pandemic five minutes later and coming off tour with Rapsody, it was very abrupt for me,” she told Queen City Nerve. “It was my first time being single in a long time, so it’s been an awakening moment for me.”

The album was created in the solitude of a home studio, a new experience for Victoria, who had recorded much of her repertoire up to then in Jamla’s Bright Lady Studios in Raleigh.

Making music at home pushed her into a more intimate creative space, she explained, allowing her to record informally on her own time while teaching herself Pro Tools and experimenting with her voice. Sometimes, she straight up rolled right out of bed and dove into developing a song concept she had thought up overnight, she said.

The result is an album that is more personal and less polished than Victoria’s previous releases. I Can’t Make This Up is a loping narrative about the singer’s struggles to hold on to her love. Diaristic in nature, ICMTU is far from a polemic against the unfairer sex. Instead, Victoria captures the push and pull of ill-fated love connections, revealing both how they have failed her and how her failures pushed them away.

Her signature classic R&B style helps drown out the din of the “(wo)men ain’t shit” gender wars. Her sound, vocal style and visuals hearken back to a softer era of R&B, with her cover even visually referencing Teddy Pendergrass’s 1979 cover for his album Teddy.

This interest in the archive has always been a part of Victoria’s artistry. Growing up in Fayetteville and Wilson, Victoria was draped in the contours of R&B from an early age. Her dad loved big-band R&B of the ’70s, playing groups like the Commodores and Gap Band around the house.

Her mom introduced her to the flair of the divas, showing her Chaka Khan, Whitney Houston, Chanté Moore and later emerging hip-hop soul artists like SWV, Brandy, and Mary J. Blige.

Growing up enveloped in the sonic fabric of these innovators inspired Victoria from an early age.

“Everything was just so good quality,” she said. “You had to have real talent. You could not even get your toe in the door without being serious about music.”

Victoria’s mother also took her own artistry seriously, appearing in local theatre shows in Fayetteville and touring with a cover band named Ultrasonic in the 1980s.

Adding her own generational influences like Aaliyah, Destiny’s Child and the gospel tracks of Yolanda Adams and Kirk Franklin, Victoria took this musical legacy with her when she enrolled at North Carolina Central University in 2008.

She heard of a hip-hop history class taught by two hip-hop artists and enrolled during her first semester. One of those professors was Christopher “Play” Martin of the legendary golden-age duo Kid ‘n Play. The other was North Carolina legend 9th Wonder, original member of Little Brother and founder of Jamla Records. He would later sign Victoria to the label and become one of her most consistent mentors.

As executive producer and composer of two songs on the album (“All I Need” and “Rescue Me”), 9th’s Southern soul-laden fingerprints are all over I Can’t Make This Up.

Victoria reflected on her and the DJ/producer’s 15-year work relationship: “I can’t believe how much time has passed, but time flies when you have fun. Now that we’re at this project, it just feels like growth. It feels grown. It feels like we’re right where we’re supposed to be.”

But don’t mistake this maturity for the contrived stability of adulthood. As soon as the album begins with “Real Shyt,” we see that the singer’s growth has begotten honesty, not stasis. Over a cascading acoustic piano line and floating vocals from DL Zene, Victoria laments that men “always wanna talk about real shit/ ‘til it’s time to talk real shit…” This attack is parried by the woman in the mirror: “Why’d I stay so long? I’m thinking of you, but maybe I’m doing this all wrong…”

This whirling back-and-forth is carried on through “Toxic,” the first single that Heather released in 2023. The singer narrates the endless cycle of her obsession throughout the track, reflecting unrepentantly on the flaws of her love: “Maybe I’m toxic/ poisoned by love, never giving a fuck/ Taste my lips and you’re under my control…”

For Victoria, this was more than a narrative gimmick or a simple reflection of her reality. Instead, it is a reflection of what she thinks R&B can do to help us understand ourselves.

“Situations and relationships that are toxic or off and on, that doesn’t always necessarily boil down to always the man’s fault or it’s her fault,” she explained. “As an artist who cares about the culture of R&B, just being expressive and being real, I found it to be something that was important for me to make relatable to everybody.”

Perhaps nothing is more relatable to the vexed lover than the contradictory suite of songs that appears in the middle of the album: “Fool Me,” “Marry Me,” and “Rescue Me.”

“Fool Me” sets Victoria’s boundaries with a sense of strength as the singer confidently belts over smooth production from 9th Wonder and Jamla labelmate Sweata. She gestures toward a looming emotional switchback when she ironically intones, “Remember I listen to my intuition/ and it never lied to me not even once…”

Read more: Jamla Records Songbird Heather Victoria Lands in Charlotte (2020)

Considering the lies her intuition was telling her in “Toxic,” Heather V probably should have foreseen her inevitable return to her lover on “Marry Me.” She conjures her best Shug Avery as she considers getting back together with the object of her scorn from the previous song. “GPS Mrs. And Mr. / The name fits like a Glover/ Your lethal lover/ The day I kissed ya, my juke joint took us to church…”

The romantic and sexual ecstasy is short-lived. “Rescue Me” turns us right back around, dropping the obsessive attention of “Marry Me” without returning to the acerbic bite of “Fool Me.” Instead, the song finds Heather V mired in lamentation, hopelessly caught in the twists of her serpentine path towards love.

Her mourning is ephemeral. The narrative crescendos as she turns from the unstable ground of her relationship on “I Don’t Need You.” Raleigh producer Khrysis lent his signature force to the beat, and Victoria stands firmly in her conviction with vocal assistance from Meelah.

All of the questions, the instability and the shifting sands of her love seem to fade away. She musters Mary J.’s power in the key of “Not Gon’ Cry” when she calls out, more forcefully with each repetition: “I don’t need you…”

The fog of love and war seems to clear as she confidently declares: “I’m Heather V. I’m leaving/ Just move on…”

It feels as if Victoria has learned that there’s nothing to salvage between her and her love. It’s time to heal and move forward.

We should expect, at this point, that she’s eventually going back. Spoiler: Indeed, she is. In the closing chapter of her romantic chronicle, “G.L.Y.,” Victoria refuses to give us a tidy lesson to learn from her struggles.

It’s only in this last minute of the album that we get a sense of lasting clarity. The habits and contradictions that make our journeys to love so tumultuous can only be untangled through mutual effort.

“I wanted [the album] to be portrayed that it’s okay if when you’re ending things, it’s like you’re still trying to figure things out,” she explained. “You just gotta go through it.”

While “GLY” doesn’t give us a neat resolution, it starts to show us that the work of finding love is long and the road far from straight.

Artful music, at its best, is simultaneously a microscope into the life of someone else and a mirror that reflects the spirit of the listener. Victoria’s album shows us that perhaps some of the allegedly traditional values, gender wars and sexual temperance that we’re seeing in American culture is coming from a fear of our own chaos.

As most forms of conservatism, these illiberal sexual mores can work as a foothold against the swift waters of disorder. Heather Victoria tells a different story in I Can’t Make This Up. For her, the only path forward is embracing the havoc, holding up a mirror to our emotional clutter, and forging a tender path forward.