Album: Ne-Yo – Self Explanatory

Sixteen years since his debut, Ne-Yo shows no signs of slowing down.

The R&B crooner returns with his eighth studio album, Self Explanatory. The 13-track set includes previously-released singles with Jeremih (“U 2 Luv”) and Bleu (“Stay Down”), plus collaborations with Trippie Redd (“Push Up”) and Zae France (“Layin’ Low”).

“What I want people to take from this album is just music to live life to, music to feel some emotion to,” he told Jalen Rose. “We got to a place in music where the emotion kinda died down a little bit. Everybody’s real tough, everybody’s real cool. People are afraid to be vulnerable. That vulnerability is what connects us, that ability to lock into another person’s heart.”

Ne-Yo began work on the album four years ago, but the pandemic thwarted his plans.

“I started this album in 2018, and I was moving through it a little more slowly than normal,” he told Haute Living. “The pandemic really threw a monkey wrench in everything, for everybody — myself included. I wasn’t doing a lot of recording at the time because I was just trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on. It was a moment.”