Haviah Mighty released her second studio album Crying Crystals on July 14, 2023, independently. This is a catalogue album, framed as catalogue: nothing here is new, and the record still matters because it is the deliberate turn in her catalogue, the moment the most decorated young pen in Canadian hip hop stopped writing about the world for a full album and wrote about one relationship instead, stage by stage, until the tears in the title hardened into gems.
The official audio for “Zoom Zoom,” her link-up with her sister Omega Mighty, is embedded below. It is track nine of thirteen, the relapse stage of the album’s emotional sequence, and its dancehall lean is the sound of the record’s method: every feeling on Crying Crystals gets its own genre as well as its own song.
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Thirteen Tracks, Thirteen Emotional Stages
The album runs 13 tracks, each labelled with the feeling it represents, as the release tracklist shows: “Snowfall” featuring Zach Zoya (Confusion), “Lil Baby” featuring Zach Zoya (Denial), “Stress Free” (Sadness), “Huh” (Disappointment), “Sensational” featuring JessB (Frustration), “Boundaries” (Guilt), “Main Character” (Anger), “Honey Bun” (Flawed Confidence), “Zoom Zoom” featuring Omega Mighty (Relapse), “Room Service” (Bargaining), “All The Time” (Acceptance), “Manifest It” featuring Jean Deaux (Real Confidence) and “Outro.” The album was co-executive produced by Mighty and Amir Jamm, and its guest list is a map of her reach by 2023: Montreal’s Zach Zoya twice, Chicago’s Jean Deaux, New Zealand’s JessB and her own sister.
Her own account of the turn is the sharpest summary on record. “A lot of my previous works, like 13th Floor and Stock Exchange, have been observational in nature; me finding my perspective on what I perceive within society, and reflecting on that,” she said at release. “With this project, I went inward, leading to a huge amount of personal and internal growth over the past year. This project documents the emotional journey experienced through a long-winded and tumultuous relationship, the toxic thoughts, the moments and realities of a failing relationship, from the beginning of the end, to the end.” She closed the thought with the title itself: the endless tears, solidifying into gems. That is Crying Crystals.
Zoom Zoom And The Singles Run
The album arrived in stages through the first half of 2023: “Honey Bun” and “Room Service,” later paired in a combined video directed by Kit Weyman and Chris Lowe, “Huh,” and finally “Zoom Zoom” on June 30, two weeks ahead of the album. Of “Zoom Zoom,” Mighty said it is “a reflection of the regret of truly letting someone go,” a rapid change of mind rushing back to the one you love, with the singer single and lonely but confident in the first verse and thinking about the person anyway. Placed at track nine and labelled Relapse, the song does in the sequence exactly what its title promises, and its Afrobeat and dancehall energy, a homage to her family’s Caribbean roots, makes the step backwards feel like a party while it is happening.
The production bench widened with the concept. Alongside Mighty and Jamm, the album’s credits as published at release include Bizness Boi, Derelle Rideout and Tony Parker, producers whose names usually sit on American rap and R and B records, and the sound follows them, floating between hip hop, dance, pop and Afro and amapiano energies from track to track. For an artist whose first two major projects were built largely with a close Toronto circle, Crying Crystals is the sound of the room getting bigger while the subject gets smaller and closer.
The Album Between Two History-Making Projects
Context is this record’s quiet drama. It follows 13th Floor, the 2019 debut revisited in our return to 13th Floor, which made her the first hip hop artist and first Black woman to win the Polaris Music Prize, and the 2021 mixtape Stock Exchange, released November 12, 2021, which won the 2022 Juno Award for Rap Album or EP of the Year and made her the first woman ever to win in a rap album category. Two projects, two Canadian firsts, and then an album about a breakup: the sequencing is the statement. Having carried the culture’s arguments for two records, she spent the third on her own heart, and said plainly that of all her projects, this one was the most refined and fully realized.
Heard now, Crying Crystals holds up as the hinge of Haviah Mighty’s catalogue, the record that proved the pen that wrote “Thirteen” could write “Manifest It” with the same control, ending not on anger or bargaining but on real confidence, with Jean Deaux beside her. Released on July 14, 2023, it remains her most personal album, and the one that turned endless tears into gems on purpose, in public, track by labelled track.
