Haviah Mighty today shares her powerful new single, “Protest,” featuring UK grime rapper, Yizzy. Haviah and Yizzy go beyond borders, taking to their own streets to speak truth into a song and video directed by Kit Weyman & Chrris Lowe in collaboration with Director X-led Fela production (who have made videos for Drake, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, Rosalia, Jay Z and more). The track also serves to announce Haviah’s much anticipated new mixtape, Stock Exchange, coming out fall 2021.

Watch Haviah Mighty’s new video for “Protest feat. Yizzy” HERE.

Produced by Young Dreadz, Haviah Mighty‘s “Protest” is a visceral recall of the feelings of guilt and stress that many marginalized individuals carry with them daily due to centuries of suffering, heaviness, pain and bloodshed at the hands of law enforcement. The production blends slow, sad, ethereal piano chords with aggressive 808s and a drill-infused percussive groove, following a pace that rises like a heartbeat with tension. 

Says Haviah,“This song is my protest – a reminder that regardless of all the conversations, the chatter, the media, the justices and injustices – this feeling and fear we walk with, is as present as ever. After all these years, encountering the police as a marginalized person still triggers pure fear. These feelings within the production – the intensity and depth of the chords, the stress and tension of the pacing – it all mirrors the feelings of paranoia, fear, control, and our innate will to survive when encountering law enforcement. Having UK-based artist, Yizzy, bless this record brings it full circle. From a light skin male’s perspective from somewhere else on the globe, our experiences still mirror one another, a further testament to the eerie similarities of trauma among Black folks.”

Haviah‘sforthcoming Stock Exchange mixtape, featuring collaborations with TOBi,Old Man Saxon, Grandtheft, and more to be announced, will be out fall of 2021. The title refers to a reckoning Haviah had internally over the last year in regards to how artists are forced to validate their value based on random data (followers, subscribers) and losing a part of the authentic human-to-human universal experience of art. She adds,“These statistics that we use to compare ourselves to others and to define our successes, have become proof of our worth. It’s all perception. These ideas around perceived value got me thinking about the Stock Exchange. Seeing parallels between the way it flows – the constant rising and falling – all dictated by the general public’s perception of an entity’s value, and ultimately how that influences the moves that we make as individuals.”

Action and advocacy aren’t new words in Haviah Mighty’s vocabulary – they go beyond lexicon. Haviah became the first Hip-Hop artist, as well as the first Black woman, to win the Polaris Music Prize for her breakthrough 2019 album, 13th Floor. The project and the hard-hitting singles that followed highlight her vast sonic influences ranging from classic Rap/Hip-Hop elements to Caribbean rhythms, frenetic electro and diverse instrumentation, while tackling marginalization, racism, the Atlantic slave trade, loneliness, self-worth, and more. Garnering praise from Rolling Stone, the BBC, GQ, Pitchfork, NPR Music, Consequence, The Source, Complex, and more, stay tuned for more Haviah music and news soon.