There’s something fittingly contradictory about Rakiyah introducing herself through an ending. My Collection of Boy Tears may be her debut album, but its 15 tracks close the book on the Cosmic Love Odyssey – the expansive story she’s spent years building around her alter ego, the Cosmic Queen. And rather than treating that contradiction as a problem, Rakiyah sees it as part of the transformation. After all, one world has to end before another can fully form.
Throughout the alternative R&B album, which blends ethereal R&B, ambient production, and cinematic world-building, heartbreak is given a mythology large enough to hold everything that comes with it: anger, vengeance, desire, reflection, and eventually, healing.
The Cosmic Queen can be soft and ethereal one moment and consumed by darker impulses the next, while her tears can be collected and transformed into power. The tension between allowing pain to consume you and learning how to transform it becomes one of the project’s defining conflicts, but beneath the cinematic storytelling that takes place all throughout this album, the emotional stakes are deeply personal.
The fantasy may enlarge the story, but it never completely separates Rakiyah from the experiences underneath it. Rakiyah’s lived alongside this character and allowed the Cosmic Queen to carry parts of her own experiences while giving herself enough creative freedom to transform those experiences into a fully realized mythology of her own – and that commitment to making the story feel tangible doesn’t stop at the music.
As an independent artist, Rakiyah refused to let the scale of her imagination shrink to meet the limitations around her, creating seven music videos to accompany an album she’s long imagined as the soundtrack to a film. Now, with the Cosmic Love Odyssey reaching its conclusion, she’s stepping toward what she describes as a rebirth and carrying forward what the journey taught her while leaving behind what no longer deserves to follow.
In this World Of conversation, Rakiyah reflects on the emotional journey behind My Collection of Boy Tears, the evolution of the Cosmic Queen, and what it means to close one creative era while making space for the next.
This interview has been edited for clarity and flow.
Originally published on Creating Romancivity.
Matilia, World Of: My Collection of Boy Tears is your debut album, but it also concludes a story you’ve been building for years. How did you approach creating a “first” that also had to carry the emotional weight of an ending?
Rakiyah: As I was creating My Collection of Boy Tears, I realized what a juxtaposition it was to create a debut album that is also the end of a trilogy and an era. But it feels right. I knew that in order to advance as an artist, it required me to evolve, so this closure of this aspect of the story provides space for a rebirth. This metamorphosis I’m experiencing as I matriculated through the Cosmic Love Odyssey emulates the journey of a caterpillar, but I’m closing that epic story out and emerging into the industry and to my fans as a butterfly.
World Of: Once you placed all 15 tracks in sequence, what did the complete album reveal about the story that you hadn’t understood while writing the individual songs?
Rakiyah: As I started sequencing the songs, the album revealed to me just how many stages of emotions I actually went through. I knew the Cosmic Queen was on a journey from heartbreak to revenge to healing, but all the songs together revealed a saga that felt like an emotional rollercoaster. I prioritized the sonic experience of the listener, but the arrangement revealed a narrative in chronological order that paralleled my life and what I had overcome and what I’m actively navigating through. From heartbreak to heartache to this evolved state of understanding and growth.
That chronological arc matters because the album isn’t simply documenting heartbreak from a distance. It follows what happens when pain is allowed to change shape – first into anger and vengeance, then into something Rakiyah can understand a little differently. Through the Cosmic Queen, she allows both possibilities to exist: a version of pain that consumes and a version that can be transformed.
World Of: What is the difference, to you, between transforming pain into power and allowing pain to become part of your identity?
Rakiyah: In this album I wanted to portray the human side of the Cosmic Queen, where the emotions and anger consume her. I allowed her to be reactive and let the pain she experienced influence her to seek revenge and override her better judgement. I allowed her to indulge in those darker human desires where the Cosmic Queen loses herself on her path of vengeance. However, the ethereal nature of the Cosmic Queen also gives her the ability to transmute her pain and the pain of others into power along her journey of collecting tears. So in this project she represents both: one consumes, one rebuilds.
World Of: The album contains revenge, desire, and dramatic reclamation, but you’ve also described the “quiet work” of becoming whole again. What did that quieter work look like, both for the Cosmic Queen and for you?
Rakiyah: Because I live through the Cosmic Queen, we experience some things simultaneously. The quieter work looks like reflection… reflection on my experiences and my decisions. This is really captured in the writing in Waiting So Long where I practically watch my life on a screen and consider how I’m going to move forward. Do I allow my trauma and pain to delay me? Do I allow things to keep me stuck? Absolutely not. I’m ready for the next iteration of myself. I’m ready for the beautiful things on the other side of this life, so the quiet work looks like giving myself grace. It looks like shedding that version of me and what I did and what I’ve been through, so I can move forward.
World Of: Because this is your most personal work, did the elaborate mythology make vulnerability feel safer, or did placing your experiences inside such a large world make them feel even more exposed?
Rakiyah: To be very candid, this world only creates the illusion of safety. However, I’m able to lean more into my creativity through my vulnerability. This method of mythology and artistic expression made this release feel so much more fun though. I also find that this creative and captivating blend that merges with my vulnerability makes the experience more entertaining and relatable for my fans too.
The mythology creates only the illusion of safety, but it also gives Rakiyah more ways to express what vulnerability can look and sound like. That duality exists clearly within the Cosmic Queen herself, whose softness never cancels out her anger, power, or capacity for destruction. Rakiyah’s voice becomes another extension of that contradiction.
World Of: You’ve previously discussed the contrast between your soft, siren-like delivery and lyrics that can be direct or aggressive. Where on this album did softness make an emotion, confession, or threat more powerful than a louder performance would have?
Rakiyah: I am naturally a soprano, which has created a siren-like vocal identity. But I love expressing aggression and sassiness in this tone because it’s unexpected. I also personally feel like this sound reflects the nature of the Cosmic Queen: ethereal, but don’t get it twisted. That’s the nature of the entire album, the nature of the Cosmic Queen: soft and beautiful but deadly. Know U Scared is truly an embodiment of that. I believe my voice reflects elegance despite intense emotion. Even though Love’s a Losing Game is louder to reflect rising intensity, there’s still something so regal about the exasperation I’m communicating through my high-pitched vocal performance.
World Of: Creating a 15-track cinematic project independently required you to balance imagination with practical limitations. What creative choice did you refuse to scale down, even when doing so would have made the process easier?
Rakiyah: I really wanted to make sure there were visuals to complement this album conceptually. This visual component was so necessary because this album is so cinematic. I was so grateful that despite being independent, I have been able to execute 7 music videos, 7 cinematic masterpieces so that the listeners can now be viewers and be fully immersed in the Cosmic Queen’s anger, witness the Cosmic Queen’s vengeance, and really feel the Cosmic Queen’s emotional and mental spiral prior to her healing.
I needed the world to witness The Cosmic Queen’s descent into madness and feel the relief that comes from indulgence, to appreciate the eventual lightness that comes with re-grounding and healing.
For 3 years, I have been dreaming of being able to release something like a short film to complement this album because this album has always been like a soundtrack to a movie in my mind. So I am so grateful that through hard work, creative budgeting, and collaboration, I was able to execute something at such a high level despite my independence that I feel like the world will truly enjoy.
For Rakiyah, making the Cosmic Love Odyssey feel real meant refusing to contain it within the limits of an album, which makes sense because the visuals allow listeners to witness the Cosmic Queen’s descent, indulgence, and eventual return to herself rather than only hearing about it. But after years spent building that world so completely, its ending leaves Rakiyah with a much more personal question: what deserves to come with her into the next one?
World Of: And now that the Cosmic Love Odyssey is complete, what are you no longer willing to let love cost you, and what does that freedom make possible in your next era?
Rakiyah: My peace. As I have gotten older, I have realized that nothing is worth the cost of losing my peace. I have so many beautiful things in my life: my friends, my family, my joy – if something comes into my life and disturbs the peace I have, I have to let it go. There are enough challenges and tribulations that come with the path I have chosen. At the very least what I have to do is protect my peace along the way. I am free to pursue myself and my creativity to the fullest extent.
That freedom feels like the natural endpoint to a story built around heartbreak, vengeance and everything that can happen when pain is allowed to take up too much space. After years of living alongside the Cosmic Queen, Rakiyah isn’t leaving the character or her experiences behind so much as allowing them to become part of a chapter she no longer has to remain inside. The Cosmic Love Odyssey ends with healing, but Rakiyah’s own story continues with something even more expansive: the freedom to protect her peace, pursue herself fully and discover who she can become when creation is no longer tethered to what hurt her.
My Collection of Boy Tears, Rakiyah’s 15-track debut album and the final chapter of the Cosmic Love Odyssey, is out now.
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