According to the group, "The Deep" is an homage to Acid/Techno duo Drexciya, residing in the same mythological universe created for their music: "All of their records refer to a utopian underwater civilization founded by African mothers thrown overboard from slave ships.

She found the voice she was looking for in Rivers Solomon, who was already interested in much of what was in the material, including "diaspora and slavery, ecological devastation, memory and remembrance", the lyrics evoking African women drowned on the journey across the sea, of climate change and environmental destruction, of the passion of the ancestors and drive of the survivors:[3] Our mothers were pregnant African women thrown overboard while / crossing the Atlantic Ocean on slave ships.

The burden she carries threatens to destroy Yetu, so she flees to the surface while the community is observing its annual remembrance ritual, finding herself trapped in a tidal pool.

This is told through the memories of Basha, Yetu's predecessor, who lived when the wajinru were threatened by global warming and energy companies desiring the fossil fuels lying below the ocean bed: "Below us, deep beneath the sand, there is a substance they crave.

Basha led the wajinru, whose emotions can telekinetically control the ocean's water, in creating a massive storm and tidal wave that wreaked devastation on the surface world.

He notes that the unique composition of music, poetry and prose from various creators that is The Deep is more typical of television and film, but that it works remarkably well in this case.

Yetu's plight is an essential, emotionally fraught conflict between duty and sacrifice, between tradition and progress, between the individual and the common good, and between vengeance and forgiveness.

Furthermore, enjoying the story doesn't require any foreknowledge of clipping., Drexciya, or the mythology of the wajinru that precedes it; while those elements certainly enrich the novel, Solomon's text stands alone as a wise, daring, touching, and important addition to the Afrofuturist canon, and one that carries its own rhythmic and melodic grace — not to mention a wholly relevant and righteous gravity.

"[6] In a starred review, Publishers Weekly enumerates the creative iterations built upon the historical drowning of pregnant African women by white slavers, beginning with Drexciya's imagining of the infants surviving as a community of merfolk, leading to the rap recounting of conflict between the people of the sea and the people of the land, though Solomon's development of a novel with individual characters and deeper exploration of the larger themes, with prose "that is by turns meditative, didactic, and rawly angry".

The review raves that Solomon interrogates the devastations of slavery without ever showing a white perspective, in a tour de force reorientation of the storytelling gaze.

"[8] In the Tor.com review, Alex Brown describes The Deep as "Afrofuturism with a folklore twist", concluding that its "slim page count disguises the depth of the work within.

"[9] Booklist's starred review states that "Solomon’s beautiful novella weaves together a moving and evocative narrative that imagines a future created from the scars of the past.