Kevin Bronson on February 25th, 2021

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Tessa Kaye isn’t the first to call out the boorish behavior of dudes who implore women to “Smile More” — the rock duo Deap Vally laid it on thick a few years ago with their song of the same title — but the L.A. pop singer has her own, succinct rejoinder.

“I should smile more / maybe you should speak less / You’re somebody / I don’t need to impress,” Kaye snaps on her new song, released last week. It’s the third single overall from the Philadelphia-born artist, who was reared in Utah by her adoptive, Mormon family and moved to L.A. to pursue music. Behind those sleek vocals is a songwriter unafraid of confronting truth.

After debuting with a pretty much standard-fare pop/R&B single “Fool’s Gold,” Kaye (full name: Tessa Kaye Norman) showed a serious side with the November single “You Know Who You Are and I Hate You,” which confronted how severe anxiety “has debilitated my life at times,” she says.

“I’ve had a lot of people try to tell me that my anxiety and how much I feel is a weakness,” Kaye adds. “It’s taken a lot of self-work for me to realize that there’s a strength in allowing yourself to simply be as weak as you feel in a moment. Black women in particular are always looked at as ‘strong black women’ and while, yes, that is true, there are many sides to us.”

As for “Smile More,” Kaye says: “Every woman I know has stories of times they’ve been told to smile … usually from men, and complete strangers at that. I’ve also experienced this countless times myself since I was a little girl. It’s something I’ve never understood, and grown quite tired of, hence this song being born.”

||| Stream: “Smile More”

||| Also: Stream “You Know Who You Are and I Hate You” and “Fool’s Gold”