Jensen McRae - Are You Happy Now? (2022)

The singer-songwriter brings a more considered levity to her full-length debut, striking a balance between heartache and resolve.

The comparisons may have been inevitable given her voice—a brassy alto powered with throaty projection—but Jensen McRae wears Tracy Chapman’s influence on her sleeve. The 24-year-old’s stark folk songs center on lone guitars, with bluesy grooves and linear narratives delivered in second person. Yet the most striking similarity is the way McRae enunciates, mumbling through verses with a shy aloofness, embellishing odd vowels and images before belting choruses with glaring urgency. These punctuations can be startling, but they rarely feel gratuitous in light of McRae’s allusive subject matter: Her earliest singles confronted abuse and degradation, filtering brazen candor through an allegorical lens.