“From the moment I started singing,” Jae Stephens tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, “my parents put me down in front of Beyoncé music videos, and they were like, OK, you want to do this, then that’s what you need to do.” So she did: She wrote songs for other artists before launching her own career, a journey best summed up by the title of her 2019 debut EP, F**k it i’ll do it myself. Her debut album, AUDACITY, serves as another mission statement to step fully into her power and take up space in a society and industry built against it. Stephens fortifies her clever lyricism and catchy hooks with maximalist production and femme-fatale energy, asserting her rights even when they lay bare her wrongs: domesticating a former bad boy on the bass-knocking “Attaboy!”, owning her emotionally avoidant tendencies on the playful “Gymnastics,” and trading back boo’d-up life for the streets on the deceptively sweet “I Miss the City.” “We were like, how can we go for something that’s just a bit sinister underneath?” Stephens tells Lowe of the songwriting process. “It’s like, imagine this Disney princess locked away in a tower, and she really just wants to shake some ass—she’s really just sick of this guy coming to save her. Like, who cares? Just let me out!”