keiyaA

Cottage Grove, Englewood and an unloved alto saxophone

keiyaA was born Chakeiya Camille Richmond on 28 July 1992 in Chicago and raised on the city's South Side, in Cottage Grove and Englewood. She sang in the Chicago Children's Choir as a child and switched to alto saxophone in seventh grade, an instrument she has admitted she picked up for social rather than musical reasons. As she told Polyester in March 2026, she already loved music but did not really care about the saxophone. She tested into the Chicago Public Schools magnet programme, graduated from Kenwood Academy, and went on to study jazz performance at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Columbia College Chicago before leaving, frustrated by the hierarchy of the programme and unable to balance work with study.

The formative moment came outside the classroom. Watching local rappers make whole tracks on laptops convinced her she did not need a band or a studio, and she started making beats on cracked copies of Reason and FL Studio installed on a Walmart laptop her grandmother had bought. Around the same time she was playing saxophone alongside Chicago artists including Noname and Vic Mensa, before moving towards her own R&B and electronic productions. Her first release, the EP Work, arrived on 24 February 2015 on the Forever label. She left for New York shortly afterwards, adding the second capital A to her name so that streaming services could tell her apart from everyone else.

Forever, Ya Girl and the lockdown breakthrough

Her debut album, Forever, Ya Girl, was released on 27 March 2020 on Forever, a fortnight into the first pandemic lockdowns. It was largely a solo construction, with keiyaA producing, composing and playing across a record built on mantra-like repeated lines and thick, woozy loops. Pitchfork's Clare Lobenfeld scored it 8.2 and praised a resolute realness that could only happen outside the major-label gaze, and the album went on to appear in the best-of-2020 lists of Pitchfork, Rolling Stone and The Guardian.

With no touring possible, her most visible performance of that period was an NPR Tiny Desk concert recorded at home and broadcast on 11 February 2021. The reputation the record built among musicians outlasted the lockdown, but it would be five years before she followed it up.

A play, a physics metaphor and a move to XL

The gap was not idle. A single, Camille's Daughter, came out in 2022, and in early 2025 she staged a play in New York called milk thot, drawn from her experience of her Saturn return. Resident Advisor's Kiana Mickles later identified that play as the seedbed for the second album, a record that works through grief and emotional turmoil in an unexpectedly fun register.

Hooke's Law was announced on 17 September 2025 with the single Take It and a low-lit video keiyaA co-directed with Caity Arthur. The announcement described an album about the journey of self-love, passing through anger and conflict, disappointment and dissatisfaction, and rejecting traditional expectations. The first single, Stupid Prizes, had appeared on 20 August 2025, and K.I.S.S. followed on 29 October. The album itself arrived on 31 October 2025 through XL Recordings, her first release for the label. Across nineteen tracks she wrote, sang and produced everything and played every instrument, with DJ Cowriiie credited as co-producer and Rahrah Gabor the only guest, on This Time. Speaking to Polyester, she framed the physics of the title as a metaphor for resilience, and said she wanted listeners to feel what she felt making it: joy, pain, horniness, anger.

What the critics heard

The reception was the strongest of her career. Metacritic aggregated nine reviews into a score of 81, its universal acclaim band. Paste gave it 8.3, Pitchfork 8.1, The Line of Best Fit and PopMatters 8 out of 10, and AllMusic four stars. In the year-end reckonings it placed at 28 in The Guardian's fifty best albums of 2025, 40 in Pitchfork's, 10 at The Line of Best Fit, 19 in Billboard's best R&B albums and 24 at Clash.

Mickles' Resident Advisor review, published on release day, is the most useful map of how the record sounds. She heard modern R&B, trap and ambient pushed through AutoTune, used here for the first time, alongside theremin-like textures, trap beats with laser effects, a Bollywood-inflected flute and wobbling minor chords. The trick, she argued, was the contrast between deceptively ecstatic production and dark lyrical themes, and she singled out fire sign oath, get close 2 me, devotions, lateeee, motions, k.i.s.s. and until we meet again. Her summary, that the album manages to be conceptual and moving as well as fun, has been the line most critics have echoed since.

Where she stands in September 2026

keiyaA now lives in Brooklyn and has spent most of 2026 on the road. Polyester met her in London on 12 March 2026, the morning of a sold-out show at Corsica Studios, and found her impatient to take the album further afield. She said she was looking forward to singing it around the world, and that she felt ready for sweetness and softness.

On 19 May 2026 she announced the Hooke's Law Tour, 27 dates across North America, Europe and the UK, after what the announcement called only a handful of standalone performances since the album's release. The run opened at Primavera Sound in Barcelona on 3 June, took in a United States club circuit through Houston, Washington, Richmond, Durham, Atlanta, Nashville and a Chicago homecoming at Schubas on 30 June, then swung back to Europe for Dour in Belgium on 17 July, We Out Here in Dorset on 20 August, Rally in London on 26 August, End of the Road on 4 September and Cologne Jazzweek the following night. Songkick also lists a Public Records show in New York on 12 August and West Coast dates at the Wiltern in Los Angeles on 22 September and the Observatory North Park in San Diego the day after.

The tour still has a long tail. After FORM at Arcosanti in Arizona on 9 October, the European club leg runs from MeetFactory in Prague on 27 October through Les Nuits Weekender in Brussels, London Calling in Amsterdam, Le Hasard Ludique in Paris, The White Hotel in Manchester on 5 November, the Lantern at Bristol Beacon on 6 November, Sonic City in Kortrijk, ZDB in Lisbon, Porto and finally La Mûrisserie in Marseille on 14 November 2026.

The show

keiyaA performs the way she records, surrounded by the machinery. At Corsica Studios in March 2026 she stood flanked by banks of kit, driving the room with rumbling bass and laser-bright synths while her voice carried the album's declarations, including the line about being the queen of the night. The set moved between orchestral swells and gospel chords, a bamboo-flute passage over a feverish drum break, and verses that reckon openly with grief, and Polyester described a sold-out crowd transfixed by it.

The tour announcement did not name a support act, and none had been confirmed at the time of writing, so bills vary from venue to venue and festival slots stand alone. Published reviews of the 2026 shows have not yet reported running times, and neither the announcement nor the festival listings state one, so anyone buying a ticket should expect a headline set built around Hooke's Law with older material from Forever, Ya Girl in the mix, rather than a fixed, published setlist.