“This Is a Photograph,” the first single off his new album of the same name, turns that motif into a song that feels distinctly alive. The singer-songwriter contemplated the afterlife on his 2019 opus, Oh My God, and wrote his 2020 follow-up, Sundowner, after three deaths (the musician Jessi Zazu, his former producer Richard Swift, and his hero Anthony Bourdain) impacted him. Lately, Kevin Morby has been fascinated by death. And like Beyoncé herself sings, it’s sooo good. In the process, she charts a course for a future of dance music by bringing a song from the past into the present. She does it all with last-call intensity, not ready to leave the club with any unspent energy. “Renaissance” becomes an ecstatic roller coaster through dance history, taking turns into a diva-size house anthem and vogue-ready bitch track. But, just as it was for decades of electronic dance music, “I Feel Love” is Bey’s launch point. The song has the bones of Donna Summer’s groundbreaking “I Feel Love,” that chugging spacey beat and light-as-air hook, where Beyoncé perfectly embodies Summer’s sensuous voice. How do you do that for a track that, almost a half-century later, still sounds like the future? If anyone could, it’s Beyoncé, as she did on “Summer Renaissance,” the time-bending coda to her album Renaissance. Homage can be a tricky needle to thread in music: A song needs to recall and honor its predecessors while also feeling like a step forward. “I don’t need anything from anyone, it’s just not my year.” Cain’s conceptual approach - the song and album center around a character named “Ethel Cain” who runs away from home - is equal amounts ennui and cynicism: that moment in life where you’re still dreaming big but realizing you put a little “too much faith in the make-believe and high-school football team.” - A.S. “I do what I want, crying in the blеachers / And I said it was fun,” she sings with panache over a bold guitar hook and the kind of arena-rock reverb that wouldn’t sound out of place on Born in the USA. How do you channel that level of insecurity and hormones and dumb social hierarchy without sounding like *insert “Steve Buscemi carrying a skateboard” meme*? Ask Ethel Cain, who turns “American Teenager,” the centerpiece of her breakthrough album Preacher’s Daughter, into a relatable rush of youth. A.S.Īccurately conveying teen emotions on a song years after you’ve left high school is like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. Part of a class of young no-fucks-given artists keen on showcasing their visions, Doechii’s “Persuasive” feels like a small taste of what’s to come. “That marijuana, she’s so persuasive,” she coos over a pulsing beat. (The president made one small mistake: He should have selected the remix.) With SZA, Doechii flips the overused drug-anthem trope on its head by rebuilding it into a slinky club anthem. While the mêlée of her single “Crazy” is enough for the Best of 2022 shortlist, it’s “Persuasive” that feels like the more fully realized work: a somehow not-cringey ode to weed that’s cool enough for the downtown crowd yet popular enough for Barack Obama to include on his annual list of favorite songs. Thankfully, things are moving swimmingly for the Tampa singer-rapper. When Doechii signed with TDE, it was hard not to helicopter-parent the label doesn’t exactly have a stellar track record of treating its female artists favorably (as seen via SZA’s infrequent dispatches about Top Dawg president Punch).
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