“I was just made to be afraid of my own personality in every single situation I was in before I was solo,” she said.

Yola describes “Walk Through Fire” as “a breakup record” with her diffident former self. In the video for “Ride Out in the Country,” she drives a pickup truck into the backwoods and buries a corpse that also turns out to be Yola. “Doormat Yola goes in the ground where she belongs!” she explained, with a cheerful cackle.

“For so much of the album, I’m talking about who I was, not who I am,” she added. “You have to go back to a previous incarnation of yourself, you have to reconnect with that old part of yourself — and the vulnerability in that state — to be able to tell the story.”

Yola dropped out of college to work as a singer, and despite some lean times — at 21 she was evicted and homeless in London — she got gigs as a “frontwoman for hire” with her undeniable voice. In the mid-2000s she sang for Bugz in the Attic, a dance-pop group that drew large audiences in Europe, Asia and Australia, and in 2008 she toured with the Bristol trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack. She also sang and co-wrote melancholy, rootsy songs for her own group Phantom Limb.

Yola’s first teenage recording session was with the Bristol-based production team Distorted Minds, and behind the scenes, she continued to work as a studio singer and topliner for electronic producers, belting hooks others had written or coming up with lyrics and melodies for their tracks. “All of my old network that were players and music makers, there were a handful of token women and they were the singers. And then there’s a crowd of men and they’re like the expertise, all the players and the technicians,” she said. “My whole life was one of codependency.”

Yola’s voice topped British dance-club hits including “Turn Back Time” by Sub Focus, for which she wrote the top line, and “Don’t Look Back” by Duke Dumont. And because British copyright law provides “neighboring rights” royalties to performers as well as songwriters, her work was profitable. But with rare exceptions — like the country-blues-rooted “The Devil and Midnight,” which she wrote with the producer Nitin Sawhney — she refused to be credited for her studio vocals.