I had this phase, longer than I’m going to admit out loud, where I let other people set the pace on everything. In bed I was finishing second when I should have been finishing first, or taking my orgasm into my own hands and leaving before he figured out what happened. At work I sat quiet while men repeated my ideas back with more confidence and got the credit. I kept my volume dialed down and my opinions to myself and I called it being easygoing, which was a lie I told myself for years. Then something cracked open. I stopped letting it happen, all of it, starting with whoever was in my bed and radiating outward from there. First I stopped faking it. Then I stopped waiting to be chosen. Then I stopped shrinking in rooms where I was the most powerful person present. Layla Rey’s ‘Still I Rise’ is the sound of that crack.
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Production on this comes out swinging. It’s EDM-laced and propulsive and built to move your ass and make you mean it and Layla rides it with this locked-in control that makes you want to match her energy in whatever room you’re currently in. Her voice is bright and declarative, and she sounds like a woman who decided she was done waiting on anything, in bed or out of it.
She opens in the dark, chasing light anyway, which is a damn power move before she’s even hit the chorus. Conditions aren’t right and she goes regardless. Then she’s singing about claiming her life step by step, hands raised, ready to fight, and there’s heat in that image because surrender only reads as weakness when someone else forced it. When you throw your hands up because you want to, because you’re fully in it and asking for more? That’s a whole different shit entirely.
Back sore and still moving is where this song gets under my clothes, honestly. “Let your feet hurt, back sore too / Still got hustle, still got moves” and we all know what that morning looks like and she’s not hiding it. Then the bridge: “No fear in my soul / I’m stronger than before / Every scar made me whole / Now I’m rising once more.” And underneath all of it, building louder, she keeps repeating “growing, growing.” That word on repeat is doing something to me. It swells and pushes and builds toward something, and by the time the final chorus drops you’re right there with her back arched and completely fucking spent and absolutely alive.
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Layla Rey is the artist your playlist has been missing and your whole body already knows it. She’s half-Black, half-Filipino and raised on the raw honesty of Compton and the melodic sophistication of every Whitney Houston record that ever made a woman cry in her car. She moves between worlds the way the best women do – effortlessly and on her own damn terms. Her voice is velvet and her bars are surgical and she deploys both like she’s been doing this her whole life because musically she has. Neo-soul slow-burns like “Got These Deep Feels” hit like a 2am confession you didn’t mean to make out loud, and “Still I Rise Tonight” rides hypnotic underground house textures straight into your nervous system. She’s got the emotional range of classic R&B, the cadence of hip-hop, the polish of pop, and absolutely zero interest in explaining herself to anyone. Influences run deep through Janet Jackson, Kehlani, and the whole Motown songwriting lineage, but Layla Rey is building something that belongs entirely to her, and it’s sexy as hell.
I sleep as long as I want now. I finish first. I take the credit when it’s mine. The phase ended and what came after it was louder and so much better, and ‘Still I Rise’ has been waiting on the other side of it this whole time.
