Album Review Round Up: Volume 2, Number 5
Five stars!

Her magnum opus, this set astonishes for the effectiveness of each individual track and for its artfully woven throughlines. These songs foreground resilience and black experience in narratives that highlight systems of oppression in recent history and present.

It’s an album about how oppressed people attempt to reclaim power and agency, and Queen Esther reads 2026’s room correctly, knowing that such a message must be delivered with authority and without apology.

And no one in this space is better equipped to do that; hers is a singular talent.

She grounds her arrangements in a true mastery of country, folk, and blues conventions, and then she upends those conventions with the improvisational phrasing drawn from her background as a gifted jazz singer.

Every aspect of her art is disruptive, and long may she reign.