VAYA — Album 10 (Elusive Thugs). Not a new release, but " The riff is the hook and the visual is the riff's shadow, and Vaya Vaya works them together" as reviewed by Mark J.

 

VAYA VAYA — Album 10 (Elusive Thugs, 2025)
Not a new release, but " The riff is the hook and the visual is the riff's shadow, and Vaya Vaya works them together" as reviewed by Mark J.

There's a particular kind of artist who understands that the record is only one part of the thing. That the video, the image, the live ritual, the riff that lodges itself behind your sternum before you've consciously registered it — all of it is the work, all of it equally load-bearing. Vaya Vaya is that kind of artist. The Toronto-based multi-hyphenate — painter, filmmaker, musician, and by her own reckoning something closer to a vessel than a solo act — has been building this project across nine previous releases, and Album 10, released through her own Elusive Thugs platform, arrives with the full weight of that accumulated intent.

Get the reference points right first, because getting them wrong flattens what she's doing. This is not hip hop, not in any meaningful sense. The closest coordinates are somewhere in the bloodline running from PJ Harvey's most confrontational work through the controlled menace of Anna Calvi, the wired art-rock of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at their most ceremonial, the lean serrated guitar logic of The Kills, and the kind of maximalism that St. Vincent has spent her career perfecting — using the rock vocabulary not as genre loyalty but as a weapon of choice. Wolf Alice's best trick, that thing where a riff can carry both tenderness and threat in the same four bars, is in the same territory. Vaya Vaya's version is rawer, more altar than stage.

The track sequence reads like a communiqué: "!STAND UP!", "STEP IN," "LIGHT UP," "WALK AS YOU PRAY," "DON'T STAY ANYMORE SILENT," "BUMP IT!," "HELL' YA." Not titles — demands. The imperative mood is deliberate and total. Opening track "EVER IN" positions the framework immediately, structured around a lyric that doubles as a personal theology: Walk as you pray. Not aspirational. Instructional. The song moves between what press materials describe as "sacred rage and tender awakening," which is accurate but undersells the guitar work — there's a hook in there that functions like a bruise you keep pressing, catching you each time through.

What makes Vaya Vaya genuinely interesting rather than merely conceptually coherent is her understanding of the visual dimension as compositional. The music videos for "EVER IN" and "!STAND UP!" are not promotional content bolted onto songs that already exist independently — they're part of the same object. The image completes the sound. This is a sensibility that Karen O understood when the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were at their most formally ambitious, that PJ Harvey has practised across decades of reinvention, that St. Vincent deploys with the cold precision of someone who has thought very hard about what a body on a stage is supposed to mean. The riff is the hook, and the visual is the riff's shadow, and Vaya Vaya works them together.

The theological-mythological architecture running through the record — Kabbalistic structures, the biblical Jezebel reframed not as a person but as a living system of corruption and seduction — gives the album its emotional depth without tipping into the didactic. "HELL' YA" is probably the most immediately accessible track here, the one that pushes the energy forward rather than pressing down on it, but it doesn't sacrifice the underlying seriousness for that accessibility. "BUMP IT!" works similarly — a track that wants your body before it asks for your attention, but the attention requirement is still there, waiting.

Vaya Vaya has been explicit in interviews about the conceptual scale she's working at: society not on the verge of collapse but already deep inside it, and music as something that doesn't fix that but exposes it, which is the more honest ambition. What she's made across ten albums is a body of work that treats art as a practice of consciousness rather than a product, and Album 10 is where that practice achieves a kind of hard clarity. The riffs are real. The vision is total. The two things are the same thing.

vaya.am | elusivethugs.bandcamp.com