Candice Hoyes Releases Debut Album ‘Expecting’, a Journey Through Ancestry and Rebirth
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Editorial Dept.
Candice Hoyes brings years of musical exploration and personal reflection together on her debut solo album, Expecting. The 13-track project moves between spiritual jazz, soul and R&B – while exploring themes of family, ancestry, motherhood and transformation. With its rich collaborations and deeply personal songwriting, the album introduces a sound shaped by both Hoyes’ roots and her vision for what comes next.
A press release from Candice Hoyes’ team revealed that the 13-track Expecting album was made over seven years.
It all started somewhere in a family backyard, when Candice Hoyes pressed record on a chorus of Jamaican whistling frogs. The frogs never left – they estivated, burrowing down and resurfacing all through Expecting, her ethereal debut solo album, out today via La Reserve Records: something alive just under the record’s surface, waiting for rain. “If you want to know where my song ideas come from, I’m like that frog,” Hoyes says. “Humanity can be in the darkest midnight, and I’m going to perch and stare into it from my little corner and sing. I’m going to sing and someone is going to sing back.” This duality is a theme: tracing ancestry, nature and lineage yet yearning for rebirth, self-expression, rebellion. A voice that casually inhabits five octaves could only stand apart from the masses.
Listen to the Expecting album by Candice Hoyes:
The album wades into the tension between yearning and vulnerability: expecting a child, expecting a reclamation of the Black experiences, expecting to navigate unexpected and unjust contours and render freedom songs. The title track is the first ever cover of Minnie Riperton’s 1970 “Expecting.” Hoyes explains “I’ve long felt Minnie’s masterworks need to be back in the everyday discourse in this current moment.” The album also arrives as a limited edition gatefold vinyl with a 16-page zine by Zoë Pulley, poster insert and liner essay by Legacy Russell.
Order the vinyl HERE.
Its thirteen tracks slip between spiritual jazz, soul, and R&B without settling anywhere for long – a vibrant, uncharted sound easier to inhabit than to name, and one that keeps rearranging itself: songs that scan as lullabies on first listen materialize, a few plays later, as generational elegies, as prayers, as field notes from a woman studying her own becoming. Hoyes treats her soprano less like an instrument than a medium for time travel: toward foremothers and her children fusing the ancestral past to versions of herself she is still meeting. “This album is alchemy, conjuring a way to get back to total vulnerability and candor with myself,” she shares. “Doctors said there was a one in a thousand chance of having my son yet he arrived! That whole experience awakened my senses. Some of the songs are poetry that I’ve loved or held, that existed long before I did. Some of the songs are fictional stories that came to me in the writing process. And then some of them were actually inspired by my children.”
Hoyes weaves together some of the music’s most searching musicians- Brandee Younger, Makaya McCraven, Joel Ross, Sullivan Fortner, Courtney Bryan, and Junius Paul among them. The songs take shape like film vignettes where collaborators answer her call across the record’s night air, harp and vibraphone blinking on like eyes in the dark. Nowhere is that call-and-response clearer than on “Winnifred’s Barrel,” which samples four generations of women in Hoyes’ own family -a family tree run in reverse, four generations of women singing on the same track, decades apart and all at once. The covers work the same seam: the title track reimagines Minnie Riperton’s “Come to My Garden,” “Love Over Mind” floats her vocal through The Sylvers, and SWV‘s “Rain” is exploded from its elemental ’90s soul into drum-and-bass technicolor. These are not tributes so much as conversations – Hoyes singing back to the songs that first sang to her. On lead single “Pink Clouds” (video by Emmy-winning director Simone Holland), that conversation turns playful: ‘80s-esque electro-acoustic jazz building toward a head-nodding climax while Hoyes leans into her rich lower register.
EXPECTING TRACKLIST
Zora’s Moon
Expecting feat. Makaya McCraven & Junius Paul
Paradis
Making Love
Pink Clouds
Meant to Be (for Baldwin)
Notebook Age Eight
Love Over Mind feat. Makaya McCraven & Junius Paul
Rain feat. Keyon Harrold and Casey Benjamin
Face Against The Window feat. Sean Jones & Nicholas Ryan Gant
Winnifred’s Barrel feat. Junius Paul
Tired (Waiting for the World)
Expecting Outro (Gratitude)
LaReserve Records
Liner Notes by Legacy Russell
Bio by Piotr Orlov
Upcoming Candice Hoyes Live Dates
Thursday, September 10, 2026 – Redondo Beach, CA – The Den @ Montauk – TICKETS
Sunday, September 13, 2026 – Berkeley, CA – UC Berkeley (Come To Our Garden)
Saturday, September 26, 2026 – Chicago, IL – Hyde Park Jazz Fest & Miyagi Records (Record signing)
Saturday, October 17, 2026 – Chicago, IL – Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Notes for Peace)
Wednesday, October 22, 2026 – Washington, DC – Georgetown University
Wednesday, November 11, 2026 – New York, NY – The Public Theater – TICKETS
March 2027 – New York, NY – Schomburg Center
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