Xania Monet’s debut full-length, Unfolded, is purpose-built for catharsis. Just look at its song titles, some of which are written in sentence case to highlight their diary-fragment feeling—“Friends aint supposed to fade like that,” “They don’t love like Grandma DId,” “I tried to be her.” The songs—mostly smoldering R&B ballads with the occasional filigrees of piano and washes of backup vocalists—open up like a therapy session, with lyrics that drown both long-ago slights and recent disappointments in acute detail, gaining heat as the indignities pile up. There’s one catch: Xania Monet isn’t a person, but the creation of Telisha Nikki Jones, a Mississippi poet and entrepreneur who conjured up the Xania character with AI tools, including the music-generation app Suno. The lyrics are all Jones’, though, and they set the 24-track Unfolded apart from its machine-generated peers. With searing honesty and the occasional bitterly humorous observation (check out the rueful “We Only Link at Funerals”), Jones, through Monet, comments on modern womanhood in take-no-prisoners fashion over slow-jam arrangements that put the stories being told at their forefront. Monet’s voice recalls the powerful instrument of Jennifer Hudson while possessing the acidity of Mariah the Scientist, and its machine-calibrated enunciation means that every syllable of Jones’ poetry lands with purpose. A nostalgia for earlier, easier times permeates tracks like the sumptuous “Back When Love Was Real,” with the pointed “Social media Lies” taking aim at people who are “chasing love through a double-tap/But real connection don’t look like that.” While Xania Monet’s songs are often about broken bonds, the lyrics laid down by Jones have clearly struck a chord with listeners in search of musical release.