Every time we pick up our phones these days, we’re met with scenes of war, bloodshed and destruction, with all signs pointing to escalation. The anxiety is present when we fill our cars with gas and our bellies with food, the sting of bloated costs never far from our minds.
It can feel like the world is ending in ways both spectacular and banal. In the midst of these apparent end times, romantic love can feel like an abstraction — a commodity out of pace with the political urgencies that permeate our days.
If romance feels like a luxury at the end of the world, Charlotte-based singer Tracei’s debut album shows us that love is not a commodity but a vital necessity. The 27-year-old musician explores the vitalities of Black queer love specifically in her first full-length project, MOOD.
Released in February with a celebration at Prism Social on March 27, the 11-song album explores the peaks and troughs of a developing relationship over 29 minutes, beginning with the intestinal gymnastics concomitant with falling for someone followed by the lust, infatuation, distrust and vulnerability that comes with handing one’s self over to amorous chaos.
For Tracei, the project came together as a metaphor, tracing her own journey of stepping into her truth as a creative and a person.
“I go where the love is shown, because I’m going to show love regardless,” she told Queen City Nerve. “And if we teach something based off of love, we’ve got to actually live by it.”
Growing up in Florida — first in Gainesville then Boca Raton — Tracey Kemp’s early musical training came from her time in the church. Like so many Southern Black musicians, the church was a fecund musical field in which to plant the seeds of her creativity, providing the opportunity to experiment with percussion, keyboard, and eventually her voice.
Her time in the church laid the tracks for Tracei’s creative journey. On one hand, the church provided a sonic foundation for her that’s apparent in the layered vocals and choral samples featured on songs like “anxious/let go” and “me & you.”
On the other hand, it introduced her to the hypocrisy of the broader church, which simultaneously accepted LGBTQ+ talent in the choir space while rejecting the lifestyle of the people wielding that talent. As a masculine-presenting, Black, queer woman, she explained the impact that this space had on her artistic development.
“We’re people. We want people to understand us, but sometimes it’s hard that we don’t talk about how hard it is to truly walk in your skin,” Tracei said. “And I think for me, I just try to embody that everywhere I go. I’m going to be who I am truly, fully, whether you get it or not.”
Through her experience in the church, Tracei learned to start to explore what it meant to love herself. She quickly learned, as the first line in her Instagram profile declares, that she is “unable to fit in a box.”
Florida most certainly couldn’t contain her. While she was still incubating her creative career, Tracei’s love of basketball brought her to North Carolina. She played first at Gaston County’s Belmont Abbey College, keeping one foot in the church, before embarking for Wilmington’s Cape Fear Community College then arriving at Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU).
After graduating from JCSU in 2023 with a degree in social work, Tracei was involved in a bad car accident. The experience inspired her to think seriously about becoming an artist.
“I realized I spent my entire life, like, I did everything I was asked. I was a first-generational college graduate. I have two degrees. I left my hometown. I’ve done everything that was asked of me from my family. And I got to a place where I was like, ‘What do you want to do? Like, what does Tracei want?’” she recalled.
A serendipitous run-in with Charlotte-based Dreamville rapper Lute at OldNews Vintage spurred Tracei to return to one of her first loves: music.
Read more: Lute Talks ‘Gold Mouf,’ Anxiety and Dreamville Before First Local Headlining Gig (2024)
After listening to her first demo, Lute encouraged her to lean into her gift. She quickly met Charlotte touchstone emcees like MAVI and DEVN, the latter of whom featured on her 2024 track “come over.”
She released a series of singles between 2023 and 2024, the first of which, “face,” brought her to major festivals like Dreamville and SXSW.
The newly released body of work that follows these singles, MOOD features an impressive cohesion that belies the brief three years she has spent writing songs.
In collaboration with DaRemen J. and Dream Studios, Tracei rolled out the album through a series of five self-directed short films on Instagram featuring five alter egos. The five personalities — Storm, Butterfly, Swag, Lovergirl, and Crash — represent her personality’s constituents.
Butterfly, for example, represents the “overthinker” in Tracei, who struggles to accept her own beauty. Unsurprisingly, Swag is Tracei at her most confident — charming, unfiltered and present. Storm represents her introversion, calmness covering a caution that protects her heart from harm. These alter egos melt into the mélange of feelings that tempestuously swirl through her as she falls in and out of love.
Swag’s self-confidence is in full effect on tracks like “pglt” (“pretty girls love Tracei”) and “lick,” but the charged sapphic eroticism of the latter is cut with Butterfly’s self-doubt as she intones, “I’m so anxious, so anxious…” while the track fades out.
The fleshly delight of the album’s beginning leads into a stabilizing flame as Tracei falls deeper for her partner in tracks like “present” and “ijwlu (I just wanna love you).” But by “merry go round” and “can we be fr,” cracks start to form.
Lovergirl’s vulnerability clashes with the fiery self-righteousness of Crash, her defensive character. In “can we be fr,” she sings, “Can we be for real/ can you make it crystal clear now for me…” in a pleading tone before abruptly shifting into chastisement. “This is not you talking/ It’s those goddamn friends…” she chides.
By the time we arrive at the penultimate track, “a mess,” it seems as though Tracei’s love is about to fall apart. Laced with a saxophone feature from Bryan Patterson, Jr., she reflects, “I’m the problem/ and I blame myself/ Can’t blame no one else…”
She finds her resolve again on the final track, “step 4 u,” in which she gathers her best parts to step into her complete self. There’s a vulnerability in this final plea, giving her the opportunity to lay it on the table.
She knows who she is and she offers that complete self to the lover she’s been courting throughout the album.
For Tracei, the process of making MOOD led her to a deeper love for herself.
“The end of that record, I wrote that to myself, but it’s written as if it’s written to someone that I love,” she said. “As the project continued to develop, I learned a sense of self in that and understanding how to embody all these parts of me, even the insecure parts.”
The imperative of MOOD, then, is one that queer people have always had to explore, all the more as we look for love at the end of the world.
Tracei’s remarkable debut is a reminder of the simple but poignant reflection of queer studies scholar GerShun Avilez in his book Black Queer Freedom: “Sometimes, a simple kiss can make one feel freed for a moment.”
MOOD is an imperative for queer people to learn to love themselves even as guarantees of safety and stability melt away, if they were ever extended to us in the first place. The album tells us that Black queer love is loving oneself through, rather than in spite of, the chaos of catastrophe, including the thrill of the erotic, the emptiness of heartbreak and the loneliness of self-doubt.
