Jae Stephens: the villain's side, at volume

AUDACITY, out September 25 on Def Jam Recordings and Raedio, is Jae Stephens taking the room she has spent years being told to share, and mostly making it count. The title holds up: her first album, eleven tracks, her voice in front of all of it, her name in the writing credits.

She was born in Dallas and moved to Pasadena at six. She trained in vocal performance at the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts and built her first audience on Tumblr, where the account beyoncebeytwice pulled more than 200,000 followers before she had a record out. A debut single, '24K', landed in 2017, followed by a feature on Baauer and AJ Tracey's '3AM' in 2018. Then came the songwriter years: Jennifer Lopez, Normani, Latto, Sinéad Harnett. The EPs kept arriving on her own schedule, F**k it i'll do it myself in 2019, High My Name Is in 2022, then Sellout, Sellout II and Total Sellout between 2024 and 2025. Winning Raedio's creator campaign turned into a joint deal with Issa Rae's label and Def Jam. She opened for Flo on the 2025 Access All Areas tour, played Lollapalooza in August, and shared a stage with Khalid on Saturday Night Live back in 2019. In October she supports him across Europe. Her own shorthand for the music is futuristic R&B pop, and Beyoncé, Janet Jackson, Brandy and Mariah Carey are the voices she measures it against.

AUDACITY was made with the producer Dallas Caton, with MNEK credited as co-writer and singing on 'I Miss the City'. PinkPantheress turns up on background vocals in 'Crush'. Around the songs is a frame Stephens built with creative director Cass Meyers and calls Auda City: a city at night, run by women, which she has placed somewhere in the world of the 2000 film Coyote Ugly. She has said the record came out of wanting to break free of the boxes she had been put in, and out of the reaction to an earlier single, 'Afterbody', which showed her and Caton how far the sound could be pushed. The vinyl adds a twelfth track to the eleven.

What that sounds like is pop with R&B underneath and no interest in restraint: maximal where the Sellout EPs were tidy, hyperactive in a way the Top 40 rarely lets a vocalist be. The hooks arrive early and the mixes stay bright, and Stephens moves around inside a song instead of parking on the note. Versatility is the brief, and the album is not shy about it.

'Crush' opens with PinkPantheress low under Stephens' lead, which is the right way round and probably the point. 'Attaboy!' is the single and the record's clearest joke: Stephens taming a self-declared playboy at his own game. 'Sugar Trap', the song that announced the album in July, sits fourth, early enough to set the terms. The back half does the arguing. 'Expensive & Difficult' is where she belts about being hard to please, and 'Gymnastics', near the end, flips the same script by dodging a partner who wants to pin her down.

The themes are stated plainly and often: female agency, duality, the refusal to give up any part of yourself, softness sitting beside self-possession. She has said the title is about telling the story her way whether or not it makes her the bad guy. 'Soft Side' is the one track title here that reads like an admission the rest of the record is built to avoid.

This is for anyone who grew up on the Beyoncé and Janet records Stephens names and wants that pleasure delivered by a record made this decade, with a songwriter's ear for the top line. It belongs alongside current radio R&B and is smarter than most of that company. It is not for the listener who wants a debut to be modest, or who is waiting for the ballads.

The trouble is insistence. The album says what it is early and then says it again. The frame around it, the city at night and the women running it, lives in the artwork and the rollout more than in the songs. 'The Distance' is the longest track here, and length is the one thing this record's momentum does not need.

A strong debut with two or three tracks a sharper edit would have trimmed, and a voice that carries the rest without help. Stephens has spent years handing her best lines to other people. On AUDACITY she keeps them.

The tracklist

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