Motherhood reshapes everything it touches—the body, the psyche, the perception of time itself. On Phases, HIRIE’s fifth album, this transformation becomes the gravitational center around which thirteen tracks orbit, each one mapping the coordinates of becoming.

Motherhood operates as a primal force, perhaps the most powerful influence on human existence—capable of profound elevation and, in certain contexts, equally profound damage. Among the traditional values that anchor human experience, maternal energy occupies the highest position. When channeled through music, this force carries the potential to genuinely alter consciousness, to redirect thought patterns and behavior, because it channels something far beyond technical skill, emotional expression, or calculated messaging to audiences. The music becomes a vessel for transformation itself. This theme of motherhood and gradual metamorphosis—spiritual, physical, existential—forms the structural core of Phases, HIRIE’s fifth album. She describes this release as a pivotal moment in her creative trajectory, a threshold opening onto unmapped territories and promising unprecedented possibilities.

While the central message addresses motherhood and the resurgence of traditional values—HIRIE simultaneously transmits the specific emotions and states of being she experienced while crossing this threshold. The defining characteristic of Phases lies in its commitment to organic purity, to sonic authenticity. HIRIE operates within the sun-bleached territory of island reggae and California reggae, but she refuses to treat these genres as museum pieces.

“Elevation” kicks things off, and right away you know where you stand. Organs and drums create warmth you can feel in your chest—real instruments, real air moving. HIRIE’s voice does this interesting thing throughout the whole record: she sounds gentle one second, then there’s this edge the next. Soft but sharp. She’s asking you stuff—are you cool with staying exactly where you are? Has being comfortable just made you lazy? The song wraps around these little jabs so they land softer than they could. “I Am Your Vibe” extends this conversational mode, introducing guitar lines that shimmer and cascade without overwhelming the arrangement’s essential spaciousness.

The carnivalesque energy of “Messing Around” feat. Cas Haley injects urgency into the sequence. Pure reggae rhythms drive the track forward with infectious momentum, crafting a groove that demands physical response. “Let Her Heart Know” shifts the album’s center of gravity toward introspection, though the track retains the underlying current of challenge that defines HIRIE’s artistic identity. Her vocals here command attention through sheer presence—powerful yet playful, loving yet slightly dangerous.

With “Guiding Star,” Phases confronts the losses inherent in transformation. HIRIE’s performance aches with the recognition that growth requires release, that new chapters demand the closing of old ones. The track’s first half dwells in this melancholy, but midway through, the temperature shifts. “Only One” continues this recalibration toward brightness while maintaining the complexity of tone that makes Phases compelling. HIRIE’s voice balances assertion and softness, challenge and comfort. This approach allows the nuances of her delivery to emerge clearly—the slight edge in certain phrases, the warmth in others, the way she can make a single line feel like both a dare and an embrace. The album concludes with “I’m High Dub,” a track that warps time and space through its production choices. HIRIE’s vocals receive processing that evokes transmissions from alternate dimensions or distant futures, creating a sense of dislocation that serves the album’s thematic arc.

Phases does something tricky. HIRIE’s figured out how to make you think and feel at the same time, which sounds obvious until you realize how many records fail spectacularly at one or the other. Thirteen tracks here, each one carrying real weight, but they go down easy. You catch yourself nodding along, then suddenly you’re three thoughts deep into what motherhood means, or how we shed old skins, or whether the person you’re becoming will recognize the person you were.

The motherhood angle could’ve been a trap. Everyone’s got opinions about it, everyone thinks they know the script. But HIRIE treats it like a doorway, walks through into rooms about identity crisis, about transformation that scares you even as you crave it. She’s asking 2025 questions about old values—which ones still work, which ones we’re clinging to out of fear, which ones might actually save us if we’d just dust them off and look at them properly.

This album’s a departure. Her previous work was good, sometimes great, but Phases feels like someone finally saying what they’ve been circling around for years. The vulnerability here cuts deeper. The sonic experimentation pushes harder. And somehow she’s jumping between pure joy and heavy contemplation without giving you emotional whiplash. That Pacific sunset melancholy can pivot into a rhythm that gets your body moving before your brain catches up. It maps how life actually moves during big changes—messy, contradictory, somehow coherent in retrospect. The production and songwriting stay solid throughout, which matters because it gives you a reason to come back.

Here’s the thing about HIRIE’s place in reggae right now: she’s rewriting the boundaries. Most artists inherit a genre’s vocabulary and speak fluently within it. She’s inventing new words, new grammar. Her voice moves through tracks like it’s discovering space nobody knew existed. The atmosphere her music creates feels thick enough to touch, like weather rolling in off the ocean.

Where other reggae artists respect the blueprints and build careful additions, HIRIE’s out here knocking down walls and adding entirely new wings. She introduces elements—sonic textures, emotional frequencies, rhythmic experiments—that make you realize the genre was incomplete before. She’s become structurally necessary to contemporary reggae, the way certain keystones hold up entire archways. Phases doesn’t prove she’s talented or even important. It proves reggae needs her, specifically her, doing exactly this.

*This review was made possible by SubmitHub