Lalah Hathaway shares Can't Let Go and announces the album Made In Chicago

Lalah Hathaway has announced Made In Chicago, her new studio album, and released its lead single, "Can't Let Go." The five-time Grammy winner traces the record back to a single image: herself in a leather coat, looking out at Lake Michigan with the city skyline behind her.

That picture set off the rest. "I feel these songs live at the intersection of nostalgia and melancholy," Hathaway said of the album, which runs nine tracks and works as a sonic tracing of the childhood she spent in the city. It reimagines her past while pointing at what she wants to make next, rather than settling into a straight memoir.

"Can't Let Go" is the entry point, and she calls it her quiet storm. The ballad sits on the weight of holding onto a love that will not release, and Hathaway says the whole thing was built out of sense memories: the residue a moment leaves rather than the moment itself. Nothing in it is pinned to a specific date.

The personnel are drawn from the players she trusts. Hathaway made the record with her longtime collaborator and co-producer Phil Beaudreau, with saxophonists Amber Navran of Moonchild and Hailey Niswanger and flutist Elena Pinderhughes filling out the arrangements. That is a jazz-leaning bench for a soul record, and it fits a singer who has spent a career refusing the line between the two.

Chicago has been on her mind for a while. The album follows "47th Street," a single she released earlier in the month that read as a letter to the city, and Made In Chicago now reveals that song as part of a larger project rather than a one-off.

"Can't Let Go" is available on streaming and download now. The single is filed under rnb-soul, and the album's date will join the rest of the schedule on the release calendar. It arrives in a busy stretch for soul and R&B records, alongside Dawn Richard setting Creole Culture for October 9 and Danielle Ponder naming her second album.