Look closer still and you’ll spot the pentagram tattoo on his forehead, you may also spot the two moons that appear in the morning sky above Wise’s shoulder. Look closely at the cover of Serpentwithfeet’s Soil and you’ll spot Josiah Wise stood in the daylight. At its worst, Li’s musical vision verges on bland, as in ‘Bad Woman’, but the artist sticks the landing far more often than not on So Sad So Sexy. The stripped back drum sounds and delayed vocals give the track a sense of paranoia and illustrate Li’s brand of pop music at its very best. ‘Two Nights’ is manic, depicting Li smoking cigarettes, waiting the night out for a lover to return. The album is packed with a minimalist electronic instrumentation that gives the entire thing an underlying sense of intensity. “If you like the feeling of a hard rain falling/ I have a seafull, I can give you an ocean.” Performed over layers of heavily autotuned vocal harmonies and the suggestion of a bass drum, this line is typical is of the sexually-charged project as a whole. Album opener ‘Hard Rain’ sets the precedent with its haunting mantra. As the title suggests, the tone of the album flips between lust and despair, often within the space of the same song. So Sad So Sexy is a neon-drenched breakup album.
Lykke Li’s fourth album is the Swedish artist’s best work to date. Her sharp lyricism brings these stories to life, the scintillating production is the cherry atop the cake. The album is Smith sharing the experiences she’s had over the past few years, hearts broken and lessons learned. The throbbing bass is the perfect counter to Smith’s melancholic musings on first time heartbreak “When we are young / We all want someone / Who we think is the one”. ‘Teenage Fantasy’ is dark and sweet R&B at it’s finest. Indeed, the tracklist finds much charm in how youthful the material on it is. Smith has already featured on tracks from heavyweights like Stormzy, Drake, Khalid and Kali Uchis and was featured on the excellent Black Panther soundtrack earlier this year.
It’s no small wonder that the ultra smooth brand of R&B on Lost & Found can hold its own against its slickest New York contemporaries, especially considering how young and relatively inexperienced the artist is. Smith originally hailed from Walsall but traveled to London at 18 to soak in the city life.
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She encouraged me to wear colours, she encouraged me not to be limited, she encouraged me not to be a shell of a human being, and she never called it masculine or feminine, she just told me to be a full person.With so many releases flying at you, here are recommended vetted listens from Nialler9 for you this week, as collated in the Nialler9 New Releases Spotify playlist, updated weekly.Ģ1-year-old R&B artist Jorja Smiths’s debut release Lost & Found is a stunning collection of material which covers the artist’s transition from adolescence into adulthood. If I want to cry she gives me that space. “My mom never told me to be a man, she just let me. “Those systems aren’t sustainable,” he says in a voice so gentle and calm he could be describing butter. After all, the great composers all stem back from a time where you’d of had to be male, white, affluently western and educated to be heard.
I tell him I feel the classical world often feels very patriarchal. I was always aware of the wonder of community music making, I don’t think there’s a line between audience and performer, I always had this experience of how cyclical the music is and that call and response isn’t just a gospel thing, it happens in the classical world too.” My first conscious experience was church. “Even if our mothers aren’t singing to us, there’s music playing and we’re responsive to that stimulus. And Josiah traces the formation of these palettes back to the womb, seeing the EP as the current incarnation of a refinement process that began before his childhood growing up in Baltimore.
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