Teyana Taylor
Escape Room
DEF JAM
After a five year hiatus from the music industry—precipitated by feelings of underappreciation and frustration with how her career had unfolded since being signed to G.O.O.D. Music in 2012—Teyana Taylor is back. Of course, the multihyphenate never really left the cultural zeitgeist in any holistic sense. This half-decade has seen Taylor produce a number of unforgettable acting roles (most notably in 2023’s A Thousand and One), and she’s set to star alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in the latest Paul Thomas Anderson flick, One Battle After Another. Taylor has even left her mark within the music industry during this supposed downtime, working as a creative director and choreographer for the likes of Lil Baby, GloRilla, and Summer Walker.
Now feeling recharged and in control, Taylor has released Escape Room, a monumental journey through the messiness, heartache, and beauty of love and relationships that have colored the past five years of Taylor’s musical hibernation. Bouncing through fingerpicked guitar ballads, four-to-the-floor dance rhythms, and steamy R&B, Escape Room traces the emotions of a relationship from death to rebirth. The central narrative is propelled by a smattering of spoken-word openings performed by a star-studded cast of women Taylor “loves and respects,” per an interview with InStyle, starting with a fiery recitation by Taraji P. Henson about a love that grew too hot for either party to handle without getting severely burned. These narrations work almost like dialogue in a movie, intertwining with the scene-setting songs to tell this phoenix-esque story.
The songs themselves see Taylor lean into her sultry bag. Whether she’s threatening to let a relationship burn to the ground with herself inside (“Fire Girl”) or describing the lust she’s feeling as a new spark is emerging (“Pum Pum Jump”), the polymath keeps the vocals low and lush, letting her alto shine. The major departure from this is “Bed of Roses,” a lovely R&B ballad where Taylor leans into her mezzo mix to giddily sing about how beautiful lying in bed with the person you’re hopelessly infatuated with is. “You make it hard to notice we ain’t sleeping on roses,” croons Taylor, distilling the feeling into a flowery image of bliss, safety, and love.
Concluding Escape Room is “Always,” a family affair that Taylor uses to reflect on the rebirth of her relationship with music. Over a simple guitar refrain, she traces her breakup with the industry and the persistence of her love of music that always brings her “right back” to writing and recording. The track concludes with an outro narrated by Teyana’s two young daughters Rue and Junie telling their mom how proud they are of her return to music and how they’ve seen her brighten up in their lives since she began recording again. It’s a touching recording that underscores how personally heartwrenching Taylor’s decision to retire from music was five years ago for not only herself, but her loved ones as well. Luckily for them and us, Taylor has returned to music, and we are so grateful for it.
