Over the course of 4 years and three albums, Atlanta singer-songwriter Summer season Walker has developed an unimaginable expertise for detailing the messy epiphanies of Black romance. The 27-year-old artist writes like a scholar of the late Betty Wright, Mary J. Blige, and Okay. Michelle, ladies who describe love with as a lot vigor as they do the fights and misunderstandings that tear two folks aside. It got here as a shock, then, that Walker introduced on certainly one of her social media accounts previous to the discharge of her Clear 2: Mushy Life, “That is for my day 1 followers, the remainder of y’all will get y’all auto tune packed radio joints when the album come out lol.” Possibly Walker was joking, or just expressing the form of ambivalence with fame that not solely led her to cancel most of her 2020 tour because of social anxiousness, but additionally to make occasional hints at early retirement.
On her full-length albums, together with her 2019 standout Over It in addition to its worthy follow-up Nonetheless Over It, Walker sings in a supple and limpid tone that generally will get flattened by the heavy processing results that typify trendy hip-hop and R&B. Her Clear collection, which started in 2019, is devoted to actual “soul music,” as she places it on the closing monitor of Mushy Life. The preparations characteristic musicians in addition to a number of producers like Solo Otto and Jay Versace and be all ears to Robert Glasper’s jazz/neo-soul fusions. But it surely’s lengthy been apparent that Walker is a Southern soul singer who creates worlds of feelings and emotions, whether or not she’s working with former boyfriend London on Da Observe on Over It or just accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. She didn’t want the stay accoutrements of Clear to show that.
Mushy Life opens with “To Summer season, From Cole (Audio Hug),” a lyrical benediction the place J. Cole turns in certainly one of his most compassionate visitor verses. “Thanks for sharing your mild, your voice and writing the gorgeous poems/‘Session 32’ deliver me to tears, be getting choked up once I hear it,” he raps in reference to Walker’s heartbroken 2018 single. “If folks knew half of the stress, they know that it’s arduous to be H.E.R./I’m sending you and SZA and Ari [Lennox] my love.” Certainly, it has by no means appeared tougher to be an R&B artist in a pop and rap world. But, given how the style is present process a creative renaissance — not solely because of chart-toppers like Walker and SZA but additionally bracing underground experimentalists like Liv.e and KeiyaA — dialogue of its demise appears extra an issue of notion at this level than precise fact.
That very same pressure between actuality and desires roils Mushy Life. Ostensibly, the EP is about reaching some form of peace after years of anguish, significantly concerning Nonetheless Over It, the place Walker mentioned her breakup with London in caustic phrases. “You understand that ain’t proper/Drained seeing all these Spanish and these white bitches residing they smooth life/With they toes kicked up they usually glass in hand/Payments is paid, because of the person,” she sings on the EP’s greatest monitor, the melancholy and wistful “Hardlife.” She wonders why she and her Black queens appear overburdened by males issues. On the wispy acoustic quantity “How Does It Really feel,” she guarantees to take revenge by being equally aggressive about exploring her “choices.” On “New Kind,” she fantasizes a few man that may make her complete, then hilariously complains about her cell getting blown up with booty calls from “Trick Daddy-looking motherfuckers.” In the meantime, Infantile Gambino, perpetually in actor mode, delivers a seductive deep-voiced cameo as certainly one of Walker’s “hood niggas.”
On practically each music, Mushy Life appears to chase a possible splendid for residing that’s considerably out of attain. However Walker is attempting. She cobbles collectively a collection of songs that sound like sketches but however construct right into a compelling portrait of a younger girl in transition and studying to understand extra than simply shallow “ratchet” pleasures. She imbues her voice with a jazzy swing harking back to Erykah Badu, and even refers back to the latter’s traditional music “Tyrone” on “New Kind.” She makes use of “Pull Up” to exhort her man to let her out of the automobile to allow them to meditate on a connection deeper than intercourse. And on the penultimate monitor, “Agayu’s Revelation,” she merely talks out her emotions over a monitor co-produced by Solange Knowles, Steve Lacy, and John Carroll Kirby. Walker admits that she tends to “crumble” her relationships into mud. However no, she causes, she’s simply “crumbling individuals who had been by no means sturdy within the first place. They’re fragile.”
“On the finish of that ghetto shit, we’re going to evolve mentally, spiritually, bodily, financially, um…emotionally,” says Walker in a relaxed, inside voice as she yearns to raised perceive herself. “And we’re going to have stability.”