NUBIA YASIN WANTS HER POWER BACK. SLIGHTLY SACRED IS THE SPELL. AN UNCOVER ARTICLE.

NUBIA YASIN • Photograph by G. Duffie

Power usually announces itself with a title, a uniform, a raised voice, a key to a house or the authority to decide what happens next. Nubia Yasin has spent most of her life studying what happens to the person standing underneath it. On August 16, she turns that study into Slightly Sacred, a ten-track debut album about fear, girlhood, sexuality, marriage, faith, the State and the long work of becoming whole.

There is an easy way to describe Yasin’s current moment: a spoken-word poet has become a singer. It is also the wrong way.

The poet did not disappear. The writer did not trade language for melody. The filmmaker, cultural critic and storyteller did not step aside so that a recording artist could take her place. Instead, all of those versions of Nubia Yasin have entered the same room, stood around the same microphone and begun making a single argument.

Slightly Sacred is that argument. Yasin calls it her complete thesis on power. She has also called its ten tracks ten spells.

THE ALBUM IS NEW. NUBIA YASIN IS NOT.

At 26, Yasin has already been working publicly for roughly a decade. Memphis first came to know her as a poet, then as a filmmaker, visual artist, cultural worker and community storyteller. Her work has examined Black femmehood, gentrification, the body, pain and the shame people inherit before they are old enough to name it.

Writing has always been the center. Years before this album, Yasin was building poems, films and installations from questions many people are taught to swallow. Her poetry collection, The Blood and Body, gathered former secrets into a physical object. Her 2020 TEDx presentation used poetry, music and photography to examine the displacement of poor Black and brown neighborhoods. At TONE, she carried the unusually precise title of chief storyteller.

In a 2023 essay about shame, Yasin described the way unaccepted parts of the self can be turned against other people: “What you cannot accept within yourself, you will weaponize against other people.”

That observation runs underneath Slightly Sacred. Shame is not merely an emotion in Yasin’s work. It is a disciplinary system. It tells a person how loudly she may speak, how much room her body may occupy, which desires make her respectable and which ones make her dangerous.

Singing became another way to confront it.

Yasin has described UNAPOLOGETIC. as a positive cultural shock: a place where curiosity, kindness and collective effort challenged the instinct to protect herself through isolation. She had been in the collective’s orbit for years before formally signing to the label in 2024. Her first major performance with the company, the Sheena Show at Crosstown Arts, revealed what could happen when an entire creative machine moved toward one person’s vision.

Last year, while looking toward the unknown, she said: “I just know what I want to say, and I want to say it louder than I ever have before.”

Slightly Sacred is louder.

NUBIA YASIN ONSTAGE • Image via UNAPOLOGETIC.

THE POET BUILT A BAND AROUND THE SENTENCE

Yasin did not arrive at her sound by deciding that a poet ought to make “poetic music.” The process was less respectable and more useful than that. She built rough demos in GarageBand on her phone and computer, recorded melodies over them and brought the pieces to IMAKEMADBEATS. Together, they decided which ideas deserved to move forward. Then the larger UNAPOLOGETIC. family entered OUTERSPACE. and rebuilt the sketches as records.

Her influences do not form an obvious genre. Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse sit close to the roots. Mitski, Bright Eyes, Geese, Sade and Morrissey appear elsewhere in the family tree. Southern phrasing, folk guitar, indie rock, pop composition and the tension of Memphis all find their way into the finished music.

That range gave Yasin room to search. She and MAD cycled through genres, arrangements and versions until the songs felt honest. As she told the Memphis Flyer, “Not that much is sacred beyond the story and the words.”

The final arrangements are deeply collective. Across the album’s development, Adam Billings, Aaron James, Eillo, Uni’Q and ADUBB have contributed instrumentation, background vocals and vocal production. On “He’s Got The Whole Wide World,” Aaron James laid the acoustic guitar foundation, Uni’Q added background vocals, Journey Hogan played violin and ADUBB played trumpet. Yasin and IMAKEMADBEATS co-produced the record, with MAD engineering and mixing.

The collaboration works because neither artist treats production as decoration. The music has to participate in the story. Sometimes it pushes the meaning forward. Sometimes it hides the knife.

POWER ENTERS THROUGH THE HOUSE

The album begins in childhood. In Yasin’s statement for Slightly Sacred, power first appears as something unpredictable and unreasonable. It teaches her that being a girl-child means being weak by nature. It creates constant bargaining and unfair terms. The person without power must become flexible, observant and subversive because power itself is free to be careless.

This is not theory gathered from a distance. It begins in the home and moves outward. The personal education of a poor Black girl becomes a way to understand gender, marriage, labor, government and the authority people are expected to obey simply because it has already been placed above them.

Yasin’s feminism is not presented as a branding decision or an intellectual accessory. In her telling, it became unavoidable. She had been awake too long to the conditions of her own submission.

The line stretches the album’s argument beyond a private battle between men and women. Yasin is interested in the architecture that makes domination appear natural: the systems that promise safety in exchange for obedience, tell people their suffering is practical and then teach them to be grateful for the cage.

From track one through track ten, Yasin traces an evolving relationship to power. She has known herself as the person restricted by it. She has also known the seduction of becoming its wielder. The album moves toward a third possibility: surrender, not to another person’s control, but to something greater than domination itself.

A PRETTY SONG ABOUT A GILDED CAGE

“He’s Got The Whole Wide World,” the second single from the album, is where the argument learns how to smile. Its instrumentation is warm, buoyant and almost playfully traditional. Underneath it sits a chapter about patriarchy, marriage and the resources women are expected to receive in exchange for pieces of their freedom.

Yasin has said that she did not grow up with an especially romantic view of marriage. Conversations with her mother presented it as a practical arrangement centered on survival rather than a guaranteed path toward love or self-actualization.

The song does not lecture its listener. It stages the conflict. The music offers pleasure while the writing questions the price of that pleasure. Yasin wanted the album to create tension rather than deliver a neat list of approved conclusions.

“Is it possible, even, to want what you want from an empowered position?” she asks in the project write-up. “I just want people asking more questions.”

That is where the collaboration with MAD becomes especially useful. He has described part of his work on the song as creating the distraction: building something enjoyable enough to let the deeper message enter before the listener has decided whether to resist it.

The trick is central to the album. Slightly Sacred does not confuse seriousness with dullness. Its political thought can arrive through a hook, a smirk, an acoustic guitar or a melody that feels far too pleasant for the subject underneath it.

NUBIA YASIN WITH THE BLOOD AND BODY • Photograph by Jamie Harmon

SLIGHTLY SACRED IS A PHRASE SHE IS TAKING BACK

The album title originates with a 1977 interview featuring romance novelist Barbara Cartland, who described women as sexless and “something perfect, slightly sacred.”

Yasin heard an entire system inside that phrase: the lifelong censure of her sexuality, the demand for perfect obedience and the process of being separated from her body in the name of becoming acceptable. Sacredness, in this construction, was not spiritual freedom. It was a behavioral restriction.

The album takes the phrase without accepting its definition.

That reclamation connects Slightly Sacred to the work Yasin has already done around shame. She has written about the internal room where people hide the parts of themselves they have been taught to hate. Art became her way of reopening that room and saying: “I see you. I don’t hate you.”

The new album applies that practice to the body, to desire and to power. It refuses the idea that wholeness can be achieved through continued obedience to the forces that produced the wound.

THIS IS A DEBUT. IT IS NOT AN INTRODUCTION.

By the time Slightly Sacred arrives, Nubia Yasin will have spent years placing difficult truths into poems, films, talks, essays, performances and rooms full of people. The album does not introduce a previously unknown artist. It reveals what happens when an established storyteller finally finds the full musical language for the argument she has been making all along.

The result is indie rock with a poet’s attention to language, a filmmaker’s understanding of atmosphere and the communal muscle of UNAPOLOGETIC. behind it. It is personal without pretending the personal is separate from the political. It is sacred without agreeing to become sexless, silent or perfectly obedient.

Yasin is not asking power to become kinder.

She is documenting how it moves, identifying what it took and preparing to take it back.