Yeza ADD

Review

Yeza - Star Of The East

07/25/2025

by Jessica Knight

What would happen in Jamaica if Roots, Reggae and Dancehall lyrics were taught in our schools, starting now? Take any track from the recently released Star of the East, Yeza’s latest album with producer Rory Gilligan aka Rorystonelove, pull a verse, and study it. The social commentary provides a cross section of the current state of play, in Jamaica and beyond.

Yeza adapts her tone drastically depending on who is being addressed on each tune, and what she has to say to them. The crowd-pleasing title track, pitched as a general introduction, has been rolling around the Kingston Dub Club sound system since 2024, with Gabre Selassie’s endorsement: ‘Yemman, from Rory gimme dat one I rinse it out!’ – to the very last drop, it seems, and receiving also the rhythmic nod of approval on the dancefloor. 

Yeza receives several more nods as the album progresses. 

The second track, Heavy Weight, gives us round one of the no retreat, no surrender call to arms – and we can thank Donald Dennis for the nice likkle baseline creeping around the lower chakras. The niceness develops further into a likkle dub, with mixer Rohan Dwyer giving time and space away from words. It’s a nicely placed lyrical interlude, repeated in Edge Control, allowing plenty room for the mixing and production elements to shine. Elsewhere, the production weaves Yeza’s dextrous voice in and out of the accompanying sounds to make sure every instrument is in conversation. What’s striking is that each song clearly has its own theme, and each theme is marvelously interpreted by the contributing talent. 

Half way through, Rude is a fresh take on a love song. It begins as a musical kiss-teet directed at the man who would dare to sweet talk a lady who is so committed to her lover, that she ends by renewing her livication. Yeza’s sweet voice floats here like a butterfly before, bap-bap-bap-bap-bap-bap, stinging six perfectly targeted punches and fleshing out themes that Heavy Weight began. 

It’s these last few tracks that got my attention, with lyrics by Rorystonelove and Monique Chambers illuminating the thoughts and feelings of many Roots-identifying Jamaicans.

Road Runner hits up the classic Stagalag dancehall riddim with lyrical emphasis on prioritising education. Hail up to the man selling ‘peanut or bag juice in a bucket, dat ah send pickney go a school and a college’. The music video itself shows pride in the farm-to-market culture also endorsed.

Four studios hosted the recording of this home-grown album: Grafton, Ankor, Tuff Gong and Black Dub. A raw energy was captured in Dean Fraser’s contributions, and you’ll have to catch the Sundays when Gabre rolls out his exclusive instrumental featuring Fraser, whose sax tears out the speakers, the bodice-ripper of horns. All horn energy, in fact, is well harnessed and dispersed, sprinkled tastefully across several tracks, this medicinal fairy dust brought to you by Dwight Richard and Okiel Mckentyre on trumpet, and Randy Fletcher on trombone. 

The solution presented here to current social and economic challenges and, most necessarily, to the problem of oppression, is to prioritize education. On Organic, Yeza sings, ‘You miss the school fee date but you spend a couple million pon doctor fi yuh shape.’ (Look out for a remix of Organic, featuring Dancehall legend, Patra.)

On Road Runner, Yeza sprays from her lyrical machine gun:

Every likkle yute fi ah hussle fi di dream,
Yuh go get wha you did waan
…
The system is a fraud.

So, what would happen in Jamaica if our artists’ roles as truthsayers were given the legit treatment by the school system? Perhaps the system would hear and speak the truth about all the topics touched upon in this edifying album: Big Pharma; pressured farmers; paedophile preachers ‘responsible for spiritual misinformation’. No one will ‘haffi kick off fi dem listen’ to the messages contained within this tuff likkle album, so well-rendered is every element contained. But if people listen and medz the messages as education and not just entertainment, what then could happen?

---

Release details