REVIEW: Yebba - Jean

Yebba doesn’t present forgiveness as something she has arrived at. Instead, she circles it, questions it, and returns to it over time, as if testing whether time itself has changed its meaning. On Jean, forgiveness is never declared. It is imagined, resisted, and reconsidered. What unfolds is not a story of healing, but something more difficult to name: an album concerned with what remains after loss, and how that remainder evolves without ever fully settling.

That tension is established immediately on the opening track, Forgiveness. At first glance, the song gestures toward faith and surrender, but the language undercuts any sense of certainty. “What if I forgave it all?” is framed as a hypothetical, quickly followed by fear, “I’d be the laughingstock of every guard at every wall.” Even in its most spiritual moments, the song refuses clarity, ending instead with hesitation: “Maybe that’s how forgiveness feels.” From the outset, forgiveness is something she can reach toward, but not yet fully hold.

But to better understand what Jean is doing, you must step outside the album itself and look at how Yebba has been tracking grief across time. On her song from 2021, How Many Years, she asks the question directly: “how many years will it take for these tears to dry?” There is no answer, only duration. On the album version of Paranoia Purple, also released in 2021 but recorded around 2019, that duration becomes something more unsettling. Each time she performs the song, the lyric shifts. The initial lyric was: “It’s two years, mom, still can’t figure it out…” and a year later it became: “it’s three years, mom…” and in 2022, live at Electric Lady, she changed it to, “5 years, too many tears, still can’t figure you out”, marking time not as resolution, but as something that continues to update without solving anything. The grief remains, only the number changes.

By the time we arrive at the centrepiece of this album, Seven Years, that passage of time has accumulated weight, but not closure. “Seven years of rage, did I lose my mind?” suggests that time has intensified the reckoning rather than resolved it. And still, she returns to the same uncertain language: “Maybe that’s how forgiveness feels.” The question has not been answered. It has changed form, shifting from something she asks, to something she must live with.

What becomes clear across this arc is that time, in Yebba’s work, does not function as a path toward healing. It functions as a record. The years pass, the language evolves, the perspective shifts, but nothing fully settles into resolution.

That unresolved tension plays out in how memory operates across Jean. On the track Yellow Eyes, the past is not something she simply leaves behind, but something she remains attached to, even protective of. “Think I’m jealous about movin’ on” disrupts any easy narrative of growth. There is repetition here, “it feels like we’ve been here before,” suggesting that movement forward is possible, but emotionally resisted. The past is not just remembered, it is maintained.

One of the album’s most revealing line arrives almost quietly: “No one knows the cost it takes to remember yourself.” It lingers because it reframes memory as something you must actively endure. To me, this lyric suggests that even self-understanding is not liberating in a simple way. It is costly, ongoing, and tied to what cannot be undone. Sometimes memory is pain. Sometimes happiness is devastating in the past tense. And across Jean, that tension is everywhere, the past not just remembered, but felt as something that cannot be returned to, only revisited.

I find myself asking, what does it mean to remember yourself after something has changed you? Not just to recall who you were, but to confront the distance between that version of yourself and who you’ve become. There is a particular kind of grief in that recognition, one that isn’t always spoken about. The grief of who you were before the loss. The grief of who you might have been.

For some, there is comfort in believing that hardship shapes you into something better, that everything you’ve endured has led you to who you are now. But Jean resists that kind of clean resolution. Because memory doesn’t always feel like growth. Sometimes it feels like contrast.

On West Memphis, she rejects surface-level constructions of self in favour of something internal and inescapable: “It’s a well that’s dug down deep inside of you.” What is inherited is not simply strength or tradition, but something heavier, something that shapes you whether you choose it or not.

Time, then, does not offer clarity. It complicates it. On Alright, that process becomes more explicit. She recalls being told to “make it plain,” to write it out, to give shape to what she’s feeling. But the act of writing doesn’t resolve anything. If anything, it exposes the limits of language itself. “God knows if she’s doing alright” lands as both a question about her mother and a quiet reflection back onto herself. By the time we reach Seven Years, that act of writing returns with more urgency: “Tears strike the page, will I waste my life?” What was once an attempt at clarity becomes a measure of time, of effort, and of whether anything has actually changed. The answer remains uncertain.

Even romantic love is not exempt from this instability. On Waterfall (Adore You), she acknowledges impermanence directly: “Obsessions fade, over time, but what remains / Love is whatever we make it tonight.” Love is not presented as a stable refuge, but as something constructed in the moment, shaped by the same forces of time and uncertainty that define the rest of the album.

By the time Jean returns to Seven Years, everything converges. Forgiveness, memory, identity, and time are all present, but nothing resolves cleanly. There is greater awareness, “Holding anything against you is only crossing myself,” but even this insight does not produce closure. Instead, it leads back to the same uncertain refrain: “Maybe that’s how forgiveness feels.”

What Jean ultimately offers is not resolution, but recognition. Across the album, and across the years that precede it, Yebba tracks time not as a path toward healing, but as a space where emotions evolve without disappearing. Forgiveness is introduced as a possibility, revisited as a question, and left unresolved. Memory resists movement. Identity is shaped by what cannot be escaped. Even love becomes provisional.

Time passes. Language evolves. Understanding deepens. But resolution never fully lands.

What remains is something quieter, and more difficult to accept: not that grief fades, but that it stays, changing shape, asking different questions, demanding to be carried in new ways.

And even then, the answer may still sound the same: Maybe.