Keke Palmer’s ‘Just Keke’ Is A Visual Album About Identity, Motherhood And Power

Key Takeaways

• Keke Palmer’s new album ‘Just Keke’ drops on June 20 and marks her return to music.
• The visual album explores identity, motherhood and self-perception through bold storytelling.
• Palmer says the project reflects her real life, not just performance.

Keke Palmer has always been that girl. She can sing, dance, act and host — and make it all look easy. Since a young age, she’s been chasing her dream of being an artist with a lot of grace, wit and a whole lot of talent. Though her acting career took off first, music has always been her first love.

Now she’s stepping back into her music era with her third studio album, Just Keke, set to drop on June 20. On Monday (June 2), she revealed the project’s cover art on Instagram, showing herself styled as a doll in a box. The visual metaphor — a play on perfection — seemingly hints at the layered themes behind her new visual album.

“I’m so excited to share some of the album packaging with you,” she wrote. “Just Keke isn’t just an album — it’s my real life.”

Palmer got honest in the rest of the caption, reflecting on everything she’s had to navigate since her first album, So Uncool. “I have tried to [perform] the fragments I had to exist in as a young woman, a Black woman and the entertainer I became,” she wrote. “Each character [is] a tool to dismantle perceptions around identity.”

Even with that goal, she says each box came with new rules and limitations. Regardless, her project is all about breaking out of that. “This is the reframe of all reframes, not over the perceptions others have had of me, but the ones I had for myself. For survival,” she continued.

“There comes a moment when performance stops being a mask and starts being a mirror. When your persona doesn’t protect you, it reveals you. When the line between who you are and who the world asked you to be gets blurry enough to create something true in you.”

For the entertainer, her album is about that blurry space and the process of becoming — the shifts, the stretch and the surrender. And with this being a visual album, Palmer will likely be letting us in from every angle.

“Sometimes I’m the object. Sometimes I’m the observer. And as always, the dramaturge,” she finished off the post.