Rise

'Rise' opens the album as a funk-driven spiritual statement, built on synth and repetition. Solange's voice moves through a meditation on falling and rising, on the discipline required to walk your own path without crumbling. The song was inspired by police killings in Ferguson and Baltimore and the protests that followed, though the lyric works inward, addressing personal reckoning and ancestral honour rather than outward rage. The architecture is simple and hypnotic. A phrase repeats, shifts, repeats again: "Fall in your ways, so you can crumble / Fall in your ways, so you can sleep at night / Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise." Then the pivot: "Walk in your ways, so you won't crumble." It is a song about choosing, about the difference between surrender and intention, framed as a kind of spiritual cleanser before the healing work of the album proper.