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May 27, 2021 By Emma Goad

Yola has shared a video for her newest single, “Stand For Myself.” The song is the title track to her upcoming new album, Stand For Myself, which is due out July 30 via Easy Eye Sound. Check out the Allister Ann-directed video below.

Yola, a soul and pop musician who is inspired by her mother’s record collection, talks about the meaning and inspiration for the music video to this track in a press release: “My school years were during the ’90s and ’00s, and Missy Elliott’s videos were always aesthetically superior to me. I feel that the video is set in the antechamber to freedom. The feeling of escaping something truly oppressive and heading towards an unknown with a sense of hope and choice you haven’t felt in a long time. We all have the capacity to go through this process in our own minds, I kinda look like a superhero at times, but I’m not. I’m just a person trying to be free.”

The song is co-written with Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys), Hannah V, and Natalie Hembry, and features The McCrary sisters on background vocals. “Stand For Myself” reflects on the potential of a shift away from bigotry and tokenism, both of which have impacted her personal life. On the inspiration for the song itself, Yola talks about the root in meaning: “The song’s protagonist ‘token,’ has been shrinking themselves to fit into the narrative of another’s making, but it becomes clear that shrinking is pointless. This song is about a celebration of being awake from the nightmare supremacist paradigm. Truly alive, awake and eyes finally wide open and trained on your path to self-actualization. You are thinking freely and working on undoing the mental programming that has made you live in fear. It is about standing for ourselves throughout our lives and real change coming when we challenge our thinking. This is who I’ve always been in music and in life. There was a little hiatus where I got brainwashed out of my own majesty, but a bitch is back.”

Auerbach also produced the album, which is being released on his Easy Eye Sound label. The album draws inspiration from seminal records of the ’70s, British radio, R&B, classic pop, and ’90s neo soul.

Her previous single “Diamond Studded Shoes” was featured in our Songs of the Week.

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