Vintage soul singer Leon Bridges’s excellent albums Coming Home and Good Thing were smartly observed and performed. Still, there’s always the feeling that such reverential revivalism, no matter the quality of his songwriting and singing, winds up on a dead-end road called Bruno Mars Close. Could Bridges edge out of his comfort zone and focus his acute vision on more obscure terrain? Gold-Diggers Sound proves he can. Named after the Hollywood hotel studio bar where he worked and played for two years improvising and refining these delicately spacious songs, it’s a sparkling collection. Afrobeat, jazz, R&B, psych and even country flood its veins, following the subtler path of last year’s Sweeter, a lament for George Floyd. Reflective and regretful, it sets the tone for an album of questions with no easy answers. Mostly, Bridges sings his fever dreams of perfect love, hopeful as an unrung bell. Magnolias, Motorbike and intoxicating duet Don’t Worry are all superb. Why Don’t You Touch Me monologues a dissolving union, the singer so impassioned and nakedly personal that it feels impolite to overhear. Seriously impressive, unashamedly grown-up songs from, and for, the soul. Billie Eilish Happier Than Ever On perhaps the most anticipated album of 2021, Eilish uses subdued yet powerful songwriting to consider how fame has seeped into every corner of her life “I’m getting older,” sings Billie Eilish, who’s 19, on Happier Than Ever’s opening track. “I’ve got more on my shoulders”, she adds, which is certainly true. Her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? wasn’t just a huge global hit, but an album that significantly altered mainstream pop music. Two years on, streaming services are clotted with bedroom-bound, teenage singer-songwriters dolefully depicting their lives: anticipation for what the genuine article does next is understandably running very high. When We All Fall Asleep … was an album that turned universal teenage traumas – romance, hedonism, friendship groups – into knowingly lurid horror-comic fantasies, in which tongues were stapled, friends buried, hearses slept in and marble walls spattered with blood. That playfulness is less evident on its successor. It flickers occasionally, as on Overheated’s exploration of stardom in the era of social media, complete with death threats (“You wanna kill me? You wanna hurt me?” she mumbles, before giggling: “Stop being flirty”) or on NDA, where the “pretty boy” she entices home is required to sign the titular legal agreement before he leaves. But the overall tone is noticeably more sombre. Your Power and Getting Older both deal with sexual coercion – the former explicitly, the latter more obliquely – but the album’s primary topic is fame and its negative impact on the person at the eye of the storm: stalkers lurk, relationships are ruined, privacy is invaded, an inability to shut off the babble of public opinion about every aspect of your personal life plays havoc with your mental health. The subject even seeps into the album’s love songs: on the title track, Eilish wonders if the object of her affections has read her interviews and panics about them revealing all on the internet; My Future struggles to weigh up a romance against the progress of her career. The music follows suit. If its sonic template is broadly similar to that of its predecessor – vocals that veer from mumbling and whispering to jazz-inflected singing but never lose a sense of intimacy; electronics evidently mixed to be listened to on headphones; the occasional shading of guitar or piano – its sound feels more subdued, less flashy. There are lots of clever production touches – the backing of Goldwing loops its a capella intro, a kind of lush, multi-tracked, easy listening reading of a verse from Hindu text the Rig Veda, in a way that recalls a broadband connection glitching – and a couple of moments where it decisively shifts away from Eilish’s previous work, with mixed results: the self-explanatory Billie Bossa Nova feels like a jokey pastiche, but Oxytocin’s techno pulse, bursts of atonal synth and vocal that more or less dispenses with melody is really gripping. But the closest it comes to the sonic firework display of Bury a Friend is the title track, which gradually builds from muffled, lo-fi acoustic ballad into an epic finale, multi-tracked vocals over drums and guitars drenched in a peculiar digital form of distortion that’s discomfiting and alienating rather than warm and familiar. Listening to a pop star complaining about being a pop star is usually enervating. It says something about Eilish’s skill as a songwriter that, in her hands, the topic feels genuinely affecting. It clearly doesn’t sound anything like Black Sabbath or Nirvana, but there are moments when, spiritually at least, Happier Than Ever feels like a 21st-century pop equivalent of the former’s Sabotage or the latter’s In Utero, two albums that also succeeded in a painting a compellingly bleak but empathetic picture of stardom. There’s something very realistic about the way the righteous anger of both spoken word piece Not My Responsibility and Overheated – “Is it news? News to who?” – doesn’t quite mask the hurt of being judged “for looking just like the rest of you”, or the way the lyrics of Getting Older thrash around, jumping from gratitude for her success to horror at the intensity of adulation and the weight of expectation Eilish has attracted. You listen to it and think: yeah, I’d probably feel like that if I were her. It’s worth noting that the songs thus far released from Happier Than Ever have received a response muted enough for the singer to respond (“eat my dust,” she wrote on TikTok, “my tits are bigger than yours”). Perhaps that’s inevitable, given the music she’s made. It’s less obviously ear-grabbing and immediate than its predecessor, with lyrics that move away from directly reflecting the lives of her teenage fans: there’s not much point in pretending you’re still just like them when you’ve sold millions, sung a Bond theme and appeared on the cover of Vogue dressed in a custom-made Gucci corset. But the fact that it’s a lower-key album than her debut shouldn’t distract from Happier Than Ever’s quality. The melodies and vocals are uniformly great; writing about the pressure of fame in a way that elicits a response other than a yawn is an extremely tough trick to pull off, and Happier Than Ever does it with aplomb. And listening to its grimmer lyrical moments, you wonder if an album that dials down her celebrity slightly would be such a bad thing if Billie Eilish is in it for the long haul, which Happier Than Ever strongly suggests she is. Dave We’re All Alone in This Together The rapper’s long-awaited second album darts between hedonistic swagger and unsparing social commentary to cement his place at rap’s apex It’s hard to conceive of a better reception for an album than that which greeted Psychodrama, Streatham rapper Dave’s 2019 debut. It won both the muso-friendly Mercury prize and the populist-minded Brit award for album of the year (a feat previously managed by only Arctic Monkeys’ debut); debuted at No 1 and earned a tranche of five-star reviews. And its impact extended well beyond the music industry. Delivered through the framework of a therapy session, Psychodrama offered nuanced, affecting social commentary and a rich seam of political protest: during a performance of the standout track, Black, at last year’s Brits, the musician added new lyrics – including the claim that “our prime minister is a real racist”. To many Dave’s remarks made perfect sense: this was a young Black man schooling politicians and the public on racism, injustice and poverty with intelligence, logic and empathy – the polar opposite of a Tory soundbite. An early taste of Psychodrama’s follow-up, however, showed that Dave wouldn’t be hemmed in by expectations of worthiness: We’re All Alone in This Together’s (WAAITT) first single, the Stormzy collaboration Clash, barely mentioned politics. A cold, imperious ode to conspicuous consumption, its appeal is hypnotic rather than melodic, the beat characterised by a deliberate sonic flatness. It was an instant hit – reaching No 3 in the charts – and now well on its way to summer pop ubiquity, a testament to Dave’s multifaceted pulling power. However, Clash, with its UK rap froideur and fixation on Rolexes, does not feel representative of the album it is taken from – but then no track on it does. WAAITT is a diverse record in many respects: touched by Afrobeats, gospel, electronica, drill and R&B, its most recurring sonic feature is a series of mournful piano figures. The album encompasses many different voices and Dave seems to be making a point of letting his collaborators put their own stamp on his songs. As on Psychodrama, the 23-year-old born David Omoregie enlists childhood friend Kyle Evans and J Hus affiliate Jae5 for production duties, but this time he swaps out his mentor Fraser T Smith – a stalwart who has worked with everyone from Craig David to Adele – for James Blake, an artist with his own distinctive sound: an eerie, digitally warped sadness. On In the Fire – a gospel-butressed production involving London indie-electronic duo Mount Kimbie – Dave lets Ghetts, Giggs, Fredo and Manchester rapper Meekz all have their say before he appears. Female voices – including R&B singer Snoh Aalegra and rapper ShaSimone – are all given extended airtime. The tracks System and Lazarus are swept up in the buoyant influence of their Nigerian collaborators, Wizkid and BOJ respectively, and nod generously to Dave’s Nigerian heritage (his parents came to the UK when he was a baby). They follow a song called Three Rivers, which chronicles the experiences of various generations of immigrants to this country – Windrush, eastern European, Middle Eastern – over elegiac keys. It is one of only a handful of straightforward showcases for Dave’s most striking talent: an ability to distil awful but also sometimes ambivalent realities where the lines between hero and villain, victim and aggressor, can be painfully blurred. The immigrant experience often forms the bedrock of Dave’s lyrics but it isn’t the headline topic of WAAITT. The abuse and exploitation of women is woven through its entirety. The centrepiece of Psychodrama was Lesley, an 11-minute tale of a toxic relationship involving a woman he met on the train; this time the subject is much closer to home. What begins with In the Fire’s neatly devastating observation that “crime’s on the rise, hate’s on the rise / Feel like everythin’ but my mum’s pay’s on the rise” continues into a distressing account of his mother’s life on Heart Attack: “I was in intensive care when I was born, mummy fell down the stairs / Whether I was gonna live or not was somethin’ uncertain / I used the word ‘fell’, with the commas inverted.” The outro is a recording of – presumably – his mother, who is utterly distraught, recalling the awful treatment she faced when she arrived in the UK and her devastation at the way life has turned out. It is hugely distressing to hear as a stranger, let alone as a son. Towards the end of Heart Attack, the music drops out and all that remains is Dave’s voice; when the doleful piano returns, it feels superfluous. It underlines the fact that the primary impression left by WAAITT isn’t really a sonic one – there is no dominant sound here. Rather, its multiplicity speaks to Dave’s expansive intentions. Whether he is using his imagination or speaking from experience, he is engaged in a noble venture to articulate pain that many people would just rather not hear about. By dint of that alone, everyone should listen. Trippers & Askers Acorn This US Americana collective impress with a subtle, ambient debut inspired by Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower As social commentators and chroniclers of the times, many musicians could justly describe themselves as “cultural anthropologists”, but Jay Hammond is the real thing, a Georgetown professor when not making music. It’s perhaps no surprise that his group, a collective, not a fixed lineup, is named after a line in a Walt Whitman poem. This debut album also owes a debt to literature, to Parable of the Sower, Octavia K Butler’s dystopian novel, set in the 2020s but written in the 1990s, whose themes of corporate greed and eco-crisis resonate strongly today. The conceptual framework informs but doesn’t overwhelm an album of delicately played modern Americana. Opener Pulsing Places starts as a simple folk song to fingerpicked guitar before mutating into a shimmering homage to nature, with Rhodes piano and pedal steel creating a pulsing, imminent atmosphere. It proves a template for the other seven pieces here. Hammond’s baritone vocals are melodically modest, but immersed in an ambient echo chamber they ring with gravitas, and the playing is slinky and skilled. The songs are oblique but suggestive – “Turn up stones in forests of your making” – and the message, like the Acorn, is one of new beginnings. Bleachers Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night The super producer’s complex musical identity finds full expression on this highly personal third Bleachers album New Jersey native Jack Antonoff is best known as the affable super producer who has played midwife to works by Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey and Lorde. Big on tunes, Antonoff’s aesthetic nonetheless embodies intriguing contradictions: a pop maximalist, he’s also a guitar kid at heart, balancing look-at-me jazz hands with downplayed vocals and atmospheric fuzz. Back in 2014, Bleachers’ debut was full of nods to Bruce Springsteen. In 2020, the man himself turned up on backing vocals on the none-more-Boss track Chinatown. So many American acts have played Boss moves in recent years – the Killers, the War on Drugs – but this Bleachers album feels like it’s about showing someone where Antonoff grew up in Jersey; at least a third of it is powered by joyous E Street Band poses, its anthemics pleasantly furred up by vulnerability. It all feels highly personal, with Antonoff still channelling underdog status on songs such as How Dare You Want More. There’s plenty of filigree too: string arrangements by Annie “St Vincent” Clark, input from Warren Ellis and a writing credit for Zadie Smith. Durand Jones & the Indications Private Space The US retro-soul outfit expand into funk and disco, facing society’s hurt head on with songs of love and hope Formed out of Indiana University’s Soul Revue and during rehearsals in a basement, Durand Jones & the Indications’ first two albums were unashamedly retro soul. After the second one, American Love Call, gained international attention and acclaim, the third broadens their interests considerably. With vocals shared between Jones (lower) and drummer Aaron Frazer (higher), they stretch from floaty melancholia to gossamer funk and disco, with synths and strings. As many as 19 musicians appear on their most lavish concoctions. Private Space may wear its classic influences on its sleeve (the Isley Brothers, the Temptations and Earth, Wind & Fire among them) but lockdowns and separation have produced a distinctly modern flavour of yearning for post-Covid togetherness and better times. Reach Out is a superb song about the hand of friendship. The uptempo Witchoo adds a tiny hint of wistfulness to lyrics anticipating post-crisis dancefloor nirvana (“if the drinks keep flowin’ I could go all night witchoo”). Love Will Work It Out brilliantly reflects on pre-pandemic times (“I sang some songs to heal some souls / Lookin’ back it felt so very long ago”) before jolting the listener into grief (“all the people lost made me fall right down to my knees”) and contemplation of the contemporary US (“modern day lynchings in the streets that I called home”). However, such downbeat moments are more than tempered by the songs’ life-affirming positivity. They tantalisingly anticipate catharsis, and are assembled and delivered with hope, love and affection. Various artists An Eclectic Selection of Music From the Arab World, Part 2 With nods to Bob Marley, the Bee Gees and more, this compilation charts cross-cultural influence on north African and Middle Eastern acts Since 2015, Berlin-based label Habibi Funk has carved out a specific and increasingly popular niche by reissuing lesser-known records by artists from north Africa and the Middle East. Treading carefully around the colonial resonances of white-owned labels purporting to “discover” these acts, label founder Jannis Stürtz splits profits 50-50 between the label and the artists (or their estates). The label released its first Eclectic Selection compilation in 2017 – one that featured everything from Fadoul’s Casablancan funk to Algerian Ahmed Malek’s expansive instrumentals. The cover of this second instalment encapsulates its culture-spanning ethos, depicting Malek at an ice-cream bar in Osaka in 1970 – a trip he later said came to inspire his own varied approach to genre. Malek is featured here again, his track Casbah providing a sprightly horn arrangement over a loose disco groove. Fadoul also reappears with the driving funk of Ahl Jedba, his throaty vocals displaying his contemporaneous kinship with James Brown’s own delivery. But it’s the artists new to this series who lend it distinction. Libyan singer Ibrahim Hesnawi’s Tendme is a welcome example of Bob Marley’s lasting influence in the country, pairing the undulating rhythms of the Libyan folk style zimzamet with the call-and-response of Hesnawi’s bouncing reggae keys and guitar melody. Also joyful is the Bee Gees-referencing synth-funk of Najib Alhoush’s Ya Aen Daly and TB Funk’s raucous, Gap Band-style disco number Free Blow, a handclap-heavy composition recorded in 1980s Milan. Much more than an anthropological curio or pastiche of “western” music, these tunes are a vital example of the cross-cultural musical identities that existed long before digital globalisation: a legacy of sonic migrations. This Eclectic Selection finds its appeal through variety – regardless of genre or period, these are all kinetic, intuitive sounds that could still happily populate dancefloors across the globe. Roderick Williams and Andrew West Birdsong Baritone Williams brings his characteristic attention to text and tone to pieces usually sung by young women, including works by Schumann and Brahms Birdsong, or … songs for birds. There are two threads running through this recital recording from the baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Andrew West. One is that their programme is punctuated by songs about nightingales, swallows, peacocks and hoopoes. The other, more intriguingly, is that many of them are usually sung by higher voices. Williams is trying to loosen ideas of who should sing what, and simultaneously conducting an experiment: does it change the song if the singer is not a woman but a man? There is a degree of ventriloquism at work in any song, of any era, in which, as Williams puts it, “male poets and composers have sought to illustrate what they imagine goes through the hearts and minds of young women”. Williams and West give us the most famous such song cycle, Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, and their performance is intelligently put together, with all Williams’s characteristic attention to text and tone. Yet there’s something about the pitch, the way a baritone’s voice sits squarely in the middle of the piano lines, that makes the whole thing sound a little too comfortable; emotions that can seem transcendent in the best performances by women are more earthbound here. That musical element seems to make more difference than any changed perspective to do with the texts – with the exception of the penultimate song, which is unequivocally about the joy of breastfeeding, and which Williams and West wisely dial back a little. The other songs, often with a less specifically feminine narrator, may not sound revelatory, but they are beautifully done – Williams is a singer who just gets better and better. The way he spins velvety lines in Brahms’s An die Nachtigall and Sapphische Ode, making every syllable meaningful, is something to savour. And it’s not all male composers – as well as a single song by Clara Schumann, there’s Sally Beamish’s Four Songs from Hafez, written in 2007, evoking birds and fish in piquant, humid music that’s a good foil for the 19th-century works.