It has been a relatively quiet year for the former of one half of Chlöe x Halle since the drop of her debut solo album, In Pieces. Despite music video-accompanied singles “How Does It Feel” with singer-songwriter Chris Brown and “Cheatback” alongside rapper Future, the project failed to land a Hot 100 hit. The Grammy-nominated songstress has dusted herself with her latest offering “FYS” – short for “F*ck Your Status”, going back to brass tacks with a linear ballad aimed at a nameless lover.
Built on top of two verses, a hook, and a bridge, the three-minute-and-twenty-nine-second-long track is a progressive R&B song backed by a sonorous bass simmering with trap-ish undulations and irregular snares.
Coupled with her honeyed vocal performance, the lyrical and sonic matrimony of “FYS” further confirms Chlöe’s comfort in her big-girl boots and her propensity for sex-positive lover girl imagery (“I know that you in love with the cat / It squeezin’ so tight, you can’t let go”). Unapologetic of publicly expressing her feelings and needs, the song is a consolidation of the avatar she successfully transitioned into since the drop of her maiden smash hit “Have Mercy”.
With “FYS”, Bailey shows as much soul as she normally does some skin, revealing a part of her that most might not be familiar with. Between possessing a body that is the envy of every vain gaze and climbing the mountain of the industry with the help of each climactic vocal register, “FYS” casts Chlöe as a down-to-earth romantic who whittles down every material offering a lover has to put on the table in search of emotional fulfilment. “Money, cars, and the diamonds / Don’t phase me, I been had it,” she declares on the chorus, prioritising the intangibles a man has to offer for the welfare of her ideal relationship.
Chlöe’s “FYS” doesn’t do too much, and she reveals an aspect of her emotional reasoning vividly enough for the song not to feel like an unfair exchange. In a world where money makes the sun shine a little yellower than normal, “FYS” is the songbird’s subtle reminder that there are primal parts of the soul that not even fame and fortune can arouse but sincere loving and incandescent intercourse of the mind and in the bedroom.
