Joy Oladokun has never been more herself than on Hope Is a Heavy Thing. If her enthralling 2024 album OBSERVATIONS FROM A CROWDED ROOM was Oladokun’s purging of Nashville’s music industry stink, Hope is the songwriter’s triumphant statement of what she can accomplish when she can work on her own terms. Hope Is a Heavy Thing finds Oladokun paying homage to the full range of her musical influences: folk, of course, but also pop, ‘90s R&B, and her parents’ afrobeat record collection. The result is an warm, retro soundtrack to the apocalypse.
Oladokun interrogates what hope actually looks like. Throughout the album, there is a sense that dancing while Rome burns seems like a smart coping mechanism on its surface, but one that is ultimately empty. “Easy Company” features an intoxicating groove with an unsettled atmosphere: what does it mean to find love with institutional racism, oppression, and climate catastrophe just around the corner? While the narrator references musical activist Fela Kuti, she prefers to engage in “doomsday dancing.” On “Zombie,” the narrator describes herself as a “zombie in a beautiful world...Locked out of Heaven but too broken for Earth.” On the album opener “Raised By the Radio (A Re-Introduction),” awash with sun-dappled guitars, Oladokun blithely asks “What’s your favorite song to dissociate to?” For Oladokun, hope is not engaging in simple pleasures; that’s just numbing our pain out — not an expression of hope that it could go away.
