Sometime late Thursday night, around 11:30 PM, Solange Knowles dropped “A Seat at the Table.” For her longtime fans this was monumental—Knowles hadn’t released a project in four years. Much like Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” this album was crafted over four years, perfected and curated into an album showing immense growth. This album, as stated on Knowles’ twitter, “…is meant to provoke healing and journey of self empowerment.” It depicts the process of falling into oneself, chipping away at the unwanted parts, and then being reconstructed into a better and happier being. Interestingly enough, this album does all of this with a particular audience in mind: black people. It tells a story of deconstruction and reconstruction painted on a backdrop of Black Pain.

The lyrics in each and every song are powerful anecdotes of what it means to heal, of what it means to be black and dealing with the imminent and precarious destruction of our race. Paired with interludes about pro-blackness (there’s one particularly powerful interlude with Tina Knowles where she speaks on the faux concept of reverse racism) this album is an ode to blackness, to hope, to being whole.

It is an album for black people, and notably for black women. The song “Mad” features rapper, Lil Wayne, and reiterates the phrase “why you gotta be so mad?” to which Solange replies to herself “I got a lot to be mad about.” Similar to theses sentiments is a quote from the great literary legend, James Baldwin, that states “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” Why are we so angry? Why do we protest? Why do we riot? Because we are mad. Because we are full of unending and fiery rage. We have a right to be. We do, indeed, have a lot to be mad about. Similarly, black women often have the stigma of being the “angry, black woman.” We cannot feel a full range of emotions like every other human being simply because we are black and we are women. We have a right to be mad. We have right to feel anger, we have a right to be enraged because we are humans living inhumanely. Of course, the song also offers more interpretations with lyrics such as “why you always talking shit, always be complaining,” a reference to people who constantly allow negativity to seep through and cause them to be mad. The song, however, insists listeners try to let it go, to allow themselves to heal amidst the troubles of the world because if not the madness just gets in the way.

Other songs notably link themselves to blackness: “Weary” describes being weary of the ways of the world, “Don’t Touch My Hair” alludes to the microagression many black women face when they wear their hair natural, F.U.B.U references the black owned brand For Us By Us, and “Closing: The Chosen Ones” speaks on black people “coming here as slaves, but going out as royalty.” And this is only a small fraction of the 21 song album filled to the brim with pro-blackness, self-love, and self-healing.

Amidst self-healing, the reconstruction process, this album also explains the deconstruction process. It explains being broken down. It explains being lost. One of my favorite songs on the album, “Cranes in the Sky,” speaks on this very idea as she sings “I tried to drink it away, I tried to put one in the air, I tried to dance it away, I tried to change it with my hair.” And that’s what we do. We drink away our pain, try to dance away our sorrows. We change our hair in hopes that changing our physical appearance will somehow make this perpetual sadness disappear. Solange goes on to sing of how she tried to sex the pain away, how she tried to work it away and keep herself busy. She tried to write it away and cry it away but she couldn’t, and the song, number three in the album, never explains how she made herself feel better. The Duke Ellington song “Sophisticated Lady” speaks on a similar ideal: a woman “smoking, drinking, never thinking of tomorrow, nonchalant” with “diamonds shining, dancing, dining with some man in a restaurant,” a woman who is unhappy with herself and is using these faux ideals of happiness to make herself happy on the surface.

Other songs on the album explain how to be reconstructed after all of this destruction, amidst the constant stench of Black Death every few days. I could write on this album endlessly—every song sparks a different connection or conversation when I listen to it, proving this album is a testament to what happens when you truly curate your craft. It is a vivid exploration of what it means to work on yourself and your art. It explains what happens when the journey of self-empowerment intersects with music and blackness. It is a statement of strength, of mourning one’s old Self and rejoicing in one’s new beginnings. It is beautiful and painful and well worth the wait.