Ben LaMar Gay isn’t so mysterious after all. His 2018 debut, Downtown Castles Can Never Block the Sun, was a compilation drawn from seven unreleased albums recorded over the previous seven years. It was a brilliantly effective hook: Chicago’s best-kept secret, finally willing to emerge from the shadows. “We created that lore, like ‘Oh man, here’s this mysterious person.’ Which is true, it was mysterious, away from the eyes and the claws of this industry,” he told his friend Jeff Albert. “But it’s not my fault that the industry has wrapped around the person that I’ve been for ages, for centuries.” Gay is still who he’s always been—a kid from the South Side of Chicago who grew up with hip-hop, a student of the foundational jazz organization AACM, and a folklorist with deep roots in the American south.

Discovering Gay’s debut was like meeting someone eager to make a good first impression, hearing their repertoire of well-practiced anecdotes. The follow-up, 2021’s crowded, exuberant Open Arms to Open Us, was like being introduced to all of his friends at once. Yowzers is a tighter, more intimate affair, an invitation into the inner circle. Its core is a set of quartet compositions for his touring band: percussionist Tommaso Moretti, guitarist Will Faber, and multi-instrumentalist Matthew Davis. Though they are built on disarmingly simple melodies inspired by blues, gospel, and folk, these songs gain their raw power through Gay’s honest, plainspoken lyrics, the type of soul-baring that’s only possible after you’ve really gotten to know someone.

Gay’s primary influence is folklore, and his main task is to see that traditional tales and songs survive from the “ancient to the future,” in the formulation of AACM’s hallmark group the Art Ensemble of Chicago. During the process, they are bound to be altered by the harrowing present. Take his “John, John Henry,” about a contemporary version of the steel-driving man who protects Gay and his back-up singers from a hail of semi-automatic gunfire. “John Henry, the block is cavin’ in,” they cry, to which he replies, “Ain’t nothin’ but my hammer sucking wind.” The singers’ words are subtly backmasked and replayed over a roiling, stuttering beat, as if their hero’s temporality is not entirely stable—he is, after all, newly arrived from the 19th century. Album opener “yowzers” plays a similar time-bending trick with soulful gospel lyrics, sung by the choir of Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu over a slow piano build: “Ain’t gon snow no more/Rain gon pour and pour/Fire don’t stop no more.” They register as biblical prophecy, and then as topical news item, and then as both—a song sung about the apocalypse, during the apocalypse.