Fifteen seconds into Mya's new video for Retrospect opener "Give It to You," a crew of friends in bold eyeshadow and bigger hair spills out onto a Venice Beach boardwalk, and the whole thing clicks. This is not a woman playing dress up in a decade she is nostalgic for. This is a woman who has spent thirty years building a career the same way that decade built its best records: on personality, on control of the means of production, and on the conviction that a great hook does not need to explain itself.

The video, directed by Josh Sikkema and co-directed by Derek Brown, treats the beach like a roller rink that forgot to bring skates. Mya and her crew move through choreography built for maximum joy rather than maximum difficulty, dressed in what the video's own description calls a mix of eighties throwback aesthetic touchstones, name checking Beat Street, Vanity 6, and Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam as reference points before landing on something the description itself calls campy fun in the California sun. It is a mood board turned into three and a half minutes of movement, and it works precisely because nobody involved is pretending the reference points are subtle.

They are not meant to be. Eagle eyed fans spotted Mya wearing an earring shaped like Janet Jackson's iconic key, a wink so specific that fan replies practically wrote the caption for her. That is the kind of detail a careless nostalgia project skips. Mya's team did not skip it, which tells you the video was art directed by someone who actually lived inside this era rather than someone who Googled it.

The album version of "Give It to You" opens with a voiceover from D-Nice, and Mya has been careful in interviews to draw a distinction between a guest feature and what she calls the role he actually plays on Retrospect. He is, in her words, more of the host of the project, an emcee walking listeners into the world of the album rather than dropping a sixteen bar verse and leaving. That distinction was reportedly her manager L. Londell McMillan's idea, the logic being that D-Nice comes from this exact era and that his legendary Club Quarantine sets during the pandemic already proved he could make a whole room feel like one shared memory. Bringing him in as a curator rather than a collaborator is a smart bit of casting, and it signals that Mya understands the difference between borrowing an era's sound and hiring one of its most trusted narrators to introduce it.

"Give It to You" is the opening statement of a much bigger case. Retrospect, Mya's tenth studio album, arrived on May 15 through her own independent record label Planet 9 in partnership with Virgin Music Group, marking her first full length project since 2018's T.K.O. (The Knock Out). The sixteen track album pulls guests from across generations and lanes, including Snoop Dogg, Joyner Lucas, and Too Short, and was built with longtime collaborators Lamar "MyGuyMars" Edwards and the production duo Mike and Keys.

The homage runs deeper than a single, campy video. Mya has said the record pays tribute to Prince, to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and to the Minneapolis funk sound that shaped her childhood, and by her own account the album has been gestating since 2016, meaning the version fans are hearing now is nearly a decade of refinement rather than a quick pivot chasing a trend cycle. In an interview timed to the release, she described the goal in blunt terms, calling it mainly and intentionally a joyful album built to bridge old school and new school sound rather than simply resurrect one at the expense of the other.

Mya Give It To You video
Photo Credit: Mya/YouTube

Three Decades In, the Throughline Is Ownership

It helps to remember what Mya was doing before any of this. Her self titled 1998 debut produced three top five R&B singles and went platinum off the strength of "Movin' On," "It's All About Me," and "My First Night With You." Her sophomore album Fear of Flying gave the culture "Case of the Ex" and "My Love Is Like...Wo," two records so embedded in R&B's DNA that they still anchor her live sets a quarter century later. She picked up a Grammy-winning collaboration credit on "Lady Marmalade" alongside Christina Aguilera, Lil Kim, and Pink, then pivoted into hip hop crossover territory with Pras and Ol' Dirty Bastard on "Ghetto Supastar." Add a Screen Actors Guild Award for her work in Chicago, and you get an artist whose three-decade R&B career was never built on one lane.

What ties all of it together, and what "Give It to You" is really arguing underneath the roller rink choreography, is creative ownership. Mya has told interviewers that the eight year gap between albums was not a disappearance but the cost of building Planet 9 on her own terms, a bet on independence years before it became the industry's favorite talking point. In a conversation timed around the album's release, she connected the dots between her earliest funk experiments and where she has landed now, pointing back to a 2003 Rick James cover on Moodring as an early flash of a sound she was still waiting for the right project to fully unlock. Two decades later, this album is that unlock.

Mya's has been unusually candid lately. She used a talk show appearance to announce the album months before release, then spent the spring in a run of sit downs explaining exactly why now was the moment for this sound. In one conversation she summed up her current stage of life plainly, joking that she is still the same performer from "Case of the Ex" but has simply moved into a different chapter, saying she is just in her grown era now. That kind of self aware framing from a veteran R&B artist is rarer than it should be, and it is a big part of why the press run has landed as candid rather than promotional.

The rollout has not stopped at videos and interviews. Mya has been booking headlining dates billed as An Evening With Mya alongside support slots on larger 2026 package runs, keeping her live performance longevity intact well past the point where most of her 1998 peers stopped touring at this pace. The timing lines up neatly with the culture's calendar too: 2026 also marks the twenty fifth anniversary of Fear of Flying and of "Lady Marmalade," giving her back catalog a built in reason to keep drawing new listeners into a career that never actually stopped, even during the quiet years between albums.

She is arriving into a summer where R&B's veteran class keeps making the same case in different accents. Tank's new single proved a two decade run of staying power does not need a comeback narrative to justify itself, and HitsCulture broke down exactly why that distinction matters. Remy Ma made a similar argument this month with a lighter touch, and our read on her own twenty year victory lap lands on the same conclusion Mya's roller-rink funk revival is built around: longevity in this genre is not luck, it is a body of work good enough to keep cashing in on its own terms.

"Give It to You" plays like a party. Underneath the choreography and the Janet Jackson earring, it is closer to a thesis statement. Mya has spent three decades proving that an era can be curated rather than chased, and Retrospect is the clearest version of that argument she has ever released. The nostalgia was never the point. The control was.