Vivinavi : Mundo : () World

On her expansive new album, Water Made Us, Chicago musician and poet Jamila Woods shines anew as she asks what it means to fully surrender to love. Across Water Made Us, Jamila embraces new genres 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. It 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 and flirtatiousness; the careful negotiation through moments of conflict; the grieving of something lost.