Less than two years after her crticially-acclaimed sophomore album K.T.S.E., Teyana Taylor will release her third record, called The Album, on Juneteenth. The turnaround from album-to-album is rather quick for Teyana as fans waited nearly four years for the follow up to her debut album, VII. Teyana wrote about the upcoming album and her reasons for releasing it on Juneteenth in an op-ed for Billboard.
“I’ve always been about us being celebrated and celebrating my culture and my people,” she wrote. “For everything to happen, from my album getting delayed and it falls perfectly on Juneteenth, yes, it’s a celebration.” Teyana later explained that while progress has been made, there is still much more work to be done and now is not the time to remove our foot from the gas.
We still got work to do, though. It’s still a lot of work to be done, but I just wanted it to be a thing where Juneteenth is amazing, but even after Juneteenth, we have to keep going. We have to keep celebrating one another and not letting that die down. We have to all keep taking a stand, because it shouldn’t be just a thing where we’re celebrated for one day, or a month, and then that’s that.
Teyana also opened up about handling her pregnancy while watching the recent events that have led to nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
It’s all the way falling apart for me, because I’m feeling for our people. And to also be a strong Black woman, and be so enraged, [it’s hard], because I’m also pregnant. I gotta find that balance to being mommy, and being that Black woman… So imagine having that mentality and you’re sitting there six months pregnant? That part just makes me cry.
Teyana also revealed that while she is not “condoning” [looting, she is for a ” by-any-means movement,” adding “I don’t care about no glass windows. I’m sorry, because we’ve been trying to be nice. We’ve been trying to be peaceful and it hasn’t gotten us anywhere.”
The Album is out 06/19 via GOOD Music and Def Jam.
[via Billboard]
