y anyone’s standards, Kehlani Parrish has experienced a pretty tumultuous rise to fame. She pulled off the not-inconsiderable feat of emerging from a TV talent show with her musical credibility intact. While still a teenager, her cover band PopLyfe reached the final of America’s Got Talent – on YouTube you can still see her belting out We Will Rock You for the edification of Piers Morgan – but when they failed to win, she quit the band, declined an offer from the show’s host Nick Cannon to join a rap group he was assembling and rescued herself from a life of penury by releasing her own mixtape. Offering R&B that was pop-facing but lyrically tough, 2014’s Cloud 19 and its successor You Should Be Here snared her a major record deal, and from that point things appeared to go according to plan, at least commercially: guest spots with Eminem, Zayn Malik, Charlie Puth and Justin Bieber, a gold-selling debut album, a succession of platinum-selling singles. But there were also high-profile relationships, equally high-profile accusations of infidelity, questions about her mental health, a suicide attempt and an accusation from the ever-delightful Chris Brown that this was a sympathy ploy, and a three-month partnership with controversial rapper YG that ended when a video of him apparently cheating on her appeared on a gossip website (he denied it). All of it has played out, a little queasily, in the full glare of social media, Instagram shots from hospital beds and all. There’s an argument that none of this has done Kehlani’s profile any harm. Certainly, she’s not above playing on the public’s prurient interest in her private life, as when she released a collaboration with YG, Konclusions, on Valentine’s Day, followed three days later by a solo track called Valentine’s Day (Shameful) that addressed the end of their relationship in no uncertain terms: “I hope you fuck around and have the son you wanted with the bitch.” Either way, concerns about her public image hang over her second album from its title down. Its centrepiece is Everybody Business, an acoustic guitar-driven track that interpolates Pharrell Williams’s Frontin’ in order to protest against her reputation at length: “I can’t be fazed by what you mistake as going insane … I hear every word they talk and try not to care at all.” Elsewhere, while there’s nothing as explicitly personal as You Know Wassup, the single she released a fortnight after YG’s unscheduled appearance on the gossip sites, there’s still plenty of rumour-stoking stuff about make-up sex, getting back with people you know you shouldn’t, attempting to change the ways of bad boys and what one website calls “the fraught aspects of a toxic relationship”, which is one way of describing the lyrics of opener Toxic: “Surfing on your face while you eat that … you know that dick has always been problematic.” This is all good, pot-stirring fun but it would be a shame if it drowned out the music. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t is an album so concise and focused that songs regularly clock in just a shade over two minutes, and which offers a succession of 21st-century reboots of the old-fashioned R&B slow jam. Everything proceeds at pretty much the same pace – languorous crawl to the bedroom – but there’s enough variety on offer to ensure it never sounds monotonous. Its trick is to hitch the viscid beats and Parrish’s multi-tracked vocals – more indebted to mainstream 90s R&B than the neo-soul artists she is compared to – to unexpected sounds and samples: a backdrop of muted electronic groans and bright sax improvisation on Hate the Club, a burst of vocals that sound like Gregorian chant put through AutoTune on Bad News, streaks of echoing guitar and off-key time-stretched voices on Can I. It’s liberally sprinkled with subtle, clever sonic touches, not least on Serial Lover, an assertion of Parrish’s pansexuality (“I’ve got bodies I want to take to the grave, I’ve got girls I want to give my last name”) that starts out straightforwardly enough, with a No Scrubs-ish combination of acoustic guitar and stammering rhythm track, before twisting unexpectedly. The hook is fantastic, underpinned by a beat that seems to slip slightly out of time behind Parrish’s voice to such disorientating effect, and you find yourself hitting the rewind button to hear it again. Walking with impressive confidence along the line that separates commercialism from experimentation, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t doesn’t need an accompanying soap opera to sell it, but it’s got one anyway. This week Alexis listened to Bright Light Bright Light feat. Jake Shears – Sensation Because, in what the TV ads keep referring to as “these difficult times”, what you sometimes need is neon pop that provokes a disco in your kitchen. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at www.befrienders.org.