Just ahead of her appearance in the NBA All-Star Celebrity Game, Janelle Monáe has released “Float,” a swaggering track that will serve as an anthem for the weekend’s festivities and beyond.
“Float” features Fela Kuti’s son Seun Kuti and his band Egypt 80. Co-produced by Monáe’s frequent collaborators Nate “Rocket” Wonder and Nana Kwabena with Sensei Bueno, the track features bombastic production as Monáe raps, “I’m light as a feather, I’m light as a feather, yeah, baby, I float/ It’s hard to look at my resume, hoo and not find a reason to toast.”
As an equally talented actor, musician, and activist, Monáe does have every reason to toast. Monáe earned critical acclaim for her latest starring role in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, and she’s set to play cabaret singer turned secret agent and civil rights activist Josephine Baker in A24’s forthcoming television series De La Resistance.
On the music side of things, Monáe last released a pair of tracks in 2021: the star-studded “Say Her Name (Hell You Talmbout),” a powerful track honoring the lives of Black women killed at the hands of police in the United States, and “Stronger” from the soundtrack to Barack and Michelle Obama’s Netflix series We the People.
Monáe’s last studio album was 2018’s Dirty Computer, which we recently named one of the greatest albums of all time.
