Listen, you can dress up an R&B song description any way you want but at the end of the night it’s always about sex and the spiritual vocabulary is the tell. Romance? Sure. Soulmates? Check. But the moment an artist starts reaching for words like “take me to the heavens” and “cloud nine,” honey, she’s describing an orgasm and the whole fucking room knows it. So when Soleya says her new song, ‘Cloud Nine,’ is a “seductive, dreamy alt-R&B about love as an elevating force, the kind that nourishes, grounds, and lifts you into your higher self,” nobody needed a decoder ring for that. You know that dick is good.
Real talk, ‘Cloud Nine’ is doing something genuinely clever. On the surface it’s a love song about elevation and divine connection. Underneath it’s a filthy, spiritual sex record and Soleya knows exactly what she’s doing with every lyric. The whole track operates on two frequencies at once and both of them are turned all the way up.
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The divine feminine angle is real and it’s doing heavy lifting here. “My energy is divine / no one know that better than you” is her telling this man that he has access to something sacred and he better act like it. Being the sweet girlfriend isn’t a commandment in her sacred texts. She’s a woman who understands her own power and has found someone worth unleashing it on. “Take me to the heavens / we can meet at the skyline / elevate our energies, one level at a time” is sex as a spiritual practice. She’s being taken to another plane of existence and her bed is the altar.
Then she just goes feral. “Break my bed frame with that magnitude / cuz we can take it all the way to the attic too / while we move heaven and earth” is the whole game exposed. She built the spiritual scaffolding just to tell this man to fuck her through the ceiling. The altitude metaphor, cloud nine, heaven, skyline, higher, it all collapses into one very specific physical command delivered with complete confidence. “Coming hot fahrenheit / cloudy mirrors all night” and I mean, you know exactly what happened in that room.
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See, what makes it work is the grounded tenderness threaded through all of it. “Steady hands / that keep me grounded / when I’m falling” is her admitting the vulnerability inside the power. She’s divine and she still needs him to hold on. That tension between feral and soft is what makes this more than just a sex record. It’s a sex record with a soul like all good R&B.
SOLEYA is 22 years old, born in New Jersey and raised between Singapore and Tokyo, and she is absolutely not the artist you see coming. She started with Indian classical vocal training and choir kid energy, fell in love with live jazz in Tokyo’s izakayas, and somehow ended up graduating Stanford with degrees in Bioengineering AND Music. The range is offensive as hell. What started as secret voice memos on her mom’s phone and bedroom Mariah covers has grown into something fully her own – alternative R&B with hip-hop and indie-pop bleeding into each other built on dreamy melodies and lyrics pulled straight from her diary. Lauryn Hill, Whitney Houston, Tori Kelly, J-Cole, Saba. She absorbed all of it, filtered it through a Stanford degree and a diary full of confessions and made it hers. Now based in California and clearly just getting started, SOLEYA is a woman in the middle of figuring out exactly how powerful she is. Spiritually and sexually. ‘Cloud Nine’ is what that discovery sounds like in real time.
I ascend to cloud nine often. In fact, I’m the high priestess of such religious experiences with a litany of men always willing to officiate the ceremony. What Soleya gets that a lot of artists her age miss is that the spiritual and the physical aren’t two different things. The divine feminine isn’t something you access in a meditation app. Sometimes it shows up at 2am when someone finally touches you like you’re worth the reverence. She’s 22 and she already knows that. The rest of us took considerably longer to figure it out.
