Tasha trades her scrappiness for orchestral control on 'You Are Spring!'

Tasha's fourth album opens with a held breath. No drums, no guitar, just three voices: hers, Brooklyn's L'Rain, and the Chicago singer and poet Jamila Woods, braided together a cappella on a track called "Spring." They sing "There's life to be found now," a line lifted from Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "To the Young Who Want to Die," and they hold the harmony so clean it sounds rehearsed for years. It is the whole record in ninety seconds. You Are Spring!, out June 26 on Bayonet, is the sound of a songwriter who has stopped guessing.

That is the gift and the catch. The Tasha who made Tell Me What You Miss the Most in 2021 worked by feel, and her albums had a habit of wandering into their best moments by accident. This one wanders nowhere. It was built.

A bigger room

The biography matters here because the album is about it. Tasha left Chicago, the only city she had really lived in, for New York after playing Nacna in Illinoise, the Broadway staging of Sufjan Stevens' album. You can hear the theater in the writing. Motifs hand off between instruments the way they do in a stage score, and she closes the circle on purpose: the opener's "don't die now" answered by the finale's "do you remember you're alive?"

She cut most of it in Los Angeles with Gregory Uhlmann, the same collaborator from her last record, a guitarist who moves between SML, his duo with Meg Duffy, and years backing Perfume Genius. They worked fast and partly remote, Uhlmann tracking on his own and sending files, Tasha cutting vocals in New Jersey when schedules collided. What came out is warm and unhurried, a lot of it played on nylon-string guitar, with the pair trading old Brazilian records back and forth: Milton Nascimento, Gal Costa. That bossa softness sits under almost everything, so the album feels like late afternoon even when the lyrics are anxious.

Where it sings

"Promise" is the high point, a waltz where a clarinet comes snaking in like it drifted through an open window from another apartment. "Kissing outside of the subway reminds me I'm young," she sings, and the line lands because the arrangement refuses to oversell it. "Porous" rides a two-chord loop that barely moves and doesn't need to; she wants "moonlight and romance with meaning" now, and the song is patient enough to wait for it. "Actor" builds its floor out of what sound like sampled street noises, trucks and grates and a far-off siren, the city smuggled into the mix.

The clarinet is the small miracle. Tasha picked it up two months before recording, took two lessons, taught herself the rest, and wrote "Special" specifically so she would have something to play it over. A debut instrument usually announces itself as a stunt. Hers doesn't. She phrases it the way she sings, and the woodwind on "Special" carries a Gershwin-at-midnight tint that no guitar on the record could.

What it leaves behind

Here is the weak stretch, because there is one. The middle of the album leans on a row of very pretty piano pieces, and "Ending" is the kind of clean ballad Tasha can write in her sleep. It is lovely and it is a little inert. The earlier records earned their best songs by taking detours, an odd field recording here, a punchy left-turn single like "Michigan" there. You Are Spring! has shaved those edges off. The craft is up, the surprise is down, and a few tracks blur into one long golden mood.

She knows it, I think, which is why the last song works. "Quick!" drops the polish entirely: a crackling acoustic guitar, a lo-fi take that could be a phone demo, her voice double-tracked against itself as she remembers being a kid and sings a lullaby to her young nieces. After fifty minutes of careful beauty, the fuzz is a relief. It sounds like a memory because it was allowed to sound unfinished.

The title is a compliment Tasha pays herself, drawn from Brooks' line "Green's your color, you are spring." On her own terms she has earned it. This is the most assured, most fully realized thing she has made. It also misses, just slightly, the version of her that didn't yet know exactly how good she was. Pros make records this clean. Only Tasha used to make them this surprising, and I hope the next one finds a little of both.