Jazz poetry of the highest order, the music and the production and the words on the color of rain all swirl together in service of a single exceptionable vision. Creating a weird wonderland, aja monet is a surrealist blues poet, activist, scholar, and one of the most unique voices currently working in any art form.

The youngest ever Grand Slam Champion at the legendary Nuyorican Poets Café, the color of rain is aja monet’s second album. Produced by Meshell Ndegeocello alongside Justin Brown, it’s easily one of the best hours of music you will hear this year, even though the focus isn’t on the music. The focus is on the words, but the music itself is the most sumptuous live jazz instrumentation with beautiful bass, remarkable drum work, gorgeous jazzy trumpet, rich piano and so much more, all providing a perfect template for aja’s poems.

The lineage is clear and proud with Gil Scott-Heron as the ultimate reference point, and you can hear the stylistic imprint of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Whitey On The Moon and B Movie clearly. Scott-Heron is often cited as an influence but his tradition is very rarely inhabited with such complete authenticity and authority. aja monet uses her own voice rather than deploying any affected performative style, and yet she’s still very much performing. The control she has over her own timbre is crucial to making the record work with a voice that’s earthy, rich, powerful, emotive, strong and poised and from that first line ‘say it with your chest’, she commands your complete attention.

The album opens with an instruction as much as a poem, with a clear call to do whatever you do with the utmost passion, before elsewhere guides you into aja’s wonderland. The ‘elsewhere’ exists where music is playing and life isn’t defined by horrors and stresses. The trumpet and piano are gorgeous, and monet’s grasp of language is endlessly fascinating as she describes the sound of sunlight and messes with the senses, conjuring concepts that technically can’t exist but make you question whether they do. withness follows, playing with the idea of witnessing together before hollyweird arrives and the tone shifts completely. The drums sound like gunshots and the dreamlike spaciousness of the opening tracks gives way to a track that’s urgent and fiercely political.

for the Congo is even more striking, relying on expressive jazz percussion as aja moves from a whisper to a shout. The central refrain ‘tell them to talk about the blood’ will knock your socks off.

working class musicians is a gorgeous and upbeat highlight that’s a light-footed and joyful tribute to working musicians who take whatever gig they can get, moving between squalid basement venues and upper class soirées in the same week with no safety net. It’s a timely and beautiful portrait in a moment when the conversation about nepo babies in the music industry is louder than ever. melting clocks is one of the album’s most experimental tracks, meditating on whether time even exists and how laughable the concept of humans trying to control something so vast and unknowable actually is.

The final stretch of the album returns to the dreamy, surreal register of its opening rounding out the hour with the same sumptuous, sunlit jazz poetry that it began with. The themes throughout are as heavy as they could possible be, covering the rise of fascism, the Congo, Palestine, guilt, complicity, and yet it’s all balanced with playfulness, lightness and a sense of joy in the power of language. the color of rain is timely and international in its scope, a deeply personal examination of what it means to exist in a society that’s perpetuating so many horrors.

The revolution will not be streamed, or boosted by an algorithm, or served to you by platforms with a financial interest in keeping you comfortable, and that’s why the color of rain deserves every brilliant word of attention we can give it. Spoken word poetry has suffered, particularly in the UK, from a certain strand of performance that leaves a pretentious taste in the mouth, but the color of rain is not a niche record, and is instead a reassertion of both the power and the palatability of poetry as an art form.

Anyone feeling overwhelmed by the state of the world should listen to aja monet’s the color of rain. You will learn, you will feel, and you will be moved by grace, fury and beauty. If the album does not appear on a great many best-of lists come December, something has gone deeply wrong.