Just hours before Solange Knowles’ album A Seat At The Table came out, I washed my hair.

As soon as the water touched it, curls began to form and multiply under the weight of lather. I did what my mother and my aunts taught me to do: combed through the strands with my fingers and, after shaking my head into a towel, I drenched each strand with oil and pink lotion, and wrapped it in a headscarf.

This is my weekly ritual for the twenty odd years I’ve been on this Earth. Each time I interact with my hair, I have come to recognize that with my hands, I am weaving through the history of all the women who came before me whose names are known and unknown, and who have lived hard and full lives. Wash day, with this in mind, has become more than a chore but another practice in preserving my being while maintaining some semblance of love for myself, my black body, and my black hair.

Solange sings explicitly about hair politics on her third studio album, which dropped Friday, and some of the same feelings of vulnerability, identity, preservation, and healing are also threaded throughout the 21 tracks of A Seat At The Table. A lot has happened since True, her last release in 2012. With this project, the younger Knowles sister gathers us all around the centerpiece of many families, the table, and wastes no time in explicitly spelling out her emotions over the past four years.

“I’m weary of the ways of the world,” she murmurs on the second track. It’s a familiar and exhausting anthem of fatigue, and mirrors the same emotions cried out by hoarse voices on the streets of Ferguson, Charlotte, Chicago, New York, Baltimore, insert city here. She follows these confessions of leeriness in a standout track “Cranes In The Sky,” singing over Blaxtopian-inspired drums and beautiful string arrangements about the ways in which she hopes to drain a clinging sadness—through sex, solitude, retail, books and more.

Throughout this album, Solange does not dance around the consistently fresh wounds that have affixed themselves on black communities; she keeps it honest, but by this point, that is something to expect from her. Songs like “Don’t You Wait” give a nod to the public dragging she gave New York Times critic Jon Caramanica over his remarks in a podcast telling her to not “bite the hand that feeds you” following her critique of his review of Brandy’s Two Eleven album. “Now I don’t want to bite the hand that’ll show me the other side / But I didn’t want to build the land that has fed you your whole life,” she slips into the track.

“My father "fed me" when he was hosed down and forced to walk on hot pavement barefoot in civil rights marches in Alabama,” she responded to Caramanica in now-deleted tweets, published February 2016. Her father, Matthew Knowles, speaks exactly to this in “Interlude: Dad Was Mad,” recounting the racism he experienced in Alabama as a child. “We lived under the threat of death every day. I was lost in this vacuum of integration, segregation and racism....I was angry for years….very angry,” he said.

This raw clip transitions smoothly into a deep dive into anger, an emotion fraught with political undertones — particularly for black women. “You got the right to be mad / But when you carry it alone you find only getting in the way” she sings, on “Mad.” Lil Wayne follows closely in a heartbreaking feature that openly acknowledges a failed suicide attempt and label woes. Together, the two acknowledge the multitudes of reasons why anger lingers but also advocate its necessary release—a practice in faith that is rooted in the black American experience.

But because it’s Solange Knowles we are talking about, the art extends past the music. A Seat At The Table is also a photo book with lyrics, featuring gorgeous work by Barcelona based artist Carlota Guerrero. Following the lyrics to “Mad” is a page that stands out from the rest because it is clearly not lines in any song. Rather, it is a telling timeline that chronicles the black struggle in America. “Explaining 1619” is written—the year slaves were carted over the Atlantic Ocean and sold. This is followed by a list of years—explaining 1793, explaining 1808, explaining 1831—up until 2018. Two asterisks separate the years 1965 and 1968 from the rest—the years Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. It’s a pounding record of the pain carried throughout history and a foundation to the feelings expressed on the album and are the very reasons anger, sadness, and frustrations are still carried with millions today.

It’s a pounding record of the pain carried throughout history and foundation to the feelings expressed on the album and are the very reasons anger, sadness, and frustrations are still carried with millions today.

By acknowledging the scars, she is also reminding herself and us all that to heal, one must continue to search for glory within oneself and community. But as much as this album is an exploration of the current state of black being, it it a celebration. Her mother, Tina Lawson celebrates that in “Interlude: Tina Taught Me.” She critiques the critics who question the pro-blackness then immediately, and falsely, associate it with anti-whiteness.

This ebb and flow of messages on the album address the constant need of recalibration, reconciliation of being, and tension of uncovering these in a world that often stifles the arduous but critical path towards self-empowerment, particularly for black women. “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare,” multi-hyphenate Audre Lorde once famously said. Radical acts of self love are similar themes that older sister Beyoncé explored with Lemonade earlier this year, though in very different ways.

Solange’s “Borderline (An Ode to Self-Care)” spells this quote out on an intimate level, but her track “F.U.B.U,” a reference to the '90s hip hop clothing brand that stands for “For Us, By Us,” is explicitly an audible representation of creating collective space for the healing of black folks across the world. “Play this song and sing it on your terms / For us / This shit is for us / Don't try to come for us,” she graciously demands. This fight for safe spaces is something that she has acknowledged recently in an essay (it’s title, “And Do You Belong? I do,” is also a lyric sung on the album). The piece explores "why many black people are uncomfortable being in predominantly white spaces” through her story of a racist encounter during Kraftwerk concert with her family, and “F.U.B.U” is the natural continuation of this essay.

www.solangemusic.com photography: @carlota_guerrero #aseatatthetable A photo posted by Solange (@saintrecords) on Sep 28, 2016 at 3:30pm PDT

While Solange stands tall and firm throughout, these messages are amplified through support by a phenomenal cast: Sampha, BJ The Chicago Kid, The Dream, Q-Tip, Dev Hynes, Kelela, Tweet, Kelly Rowland and Nia Andrews. Each feature seamlessly strengthens the messages of harmony, and together they begin to mitigating the struggle by continuing the tradition of music as a healing practice for black folks in America.

“You know, our great-great-grandfathers, grandmothers that came here—they found some kind of way to make rhythm...and they kept the rhythm, no matter what,” narrator and legendary New Orleans rapper Master P explains in his final interlude of the album. In A Seat At The Table, Solange harnesses that same innate sensibility for future generations of black people to feel and interpret for years to come.

This isn’t a pop album, or a song with radio hits you can dance to. But her meditative music carries that same ancestral power, and her ethereal voice demands attention and space that we must grant her in order to collectively move forward, even just a bit.

I'm going look for my body yeah..... Sign up at : www.solangemusic.com A photo posted by Solange (@saintrecords) on Sep 23, 2016 at 6:28am PDT

A Seat At The Table is now available to stream on Spotify, iTunes and Apple Music, and Tidal.