She wanted real-life testimonies about passion, regret, indecision, fantasy. Compressed into brief monologues, these admissions pepper Sullivan’s fourth album “Heaux Tales”

Ms. Sullivan has very loosely teamed with writer-actor-producer Issa Rae to bring Heaux Tales to life visually, and she’ll end the year with one of 2021’s best albums, a space where women can hear other women cycle through entanglements with love, sex, and money without judgment. It’s a project that welcomes contradictions as much as it does empathy, largely around the decisions Black women make while trying to undo someone else’s damage, as well as their own.