Albums of the week: Honey Dijon, Jessie Ware, Tomora, Adrian Younge

Honey Dijon

The Nightlife

(The Orchard)

When Beyoncé was making Renaissance, her 2022 celebration of queer black dancefloor culture, one of her principal collaborators, the celebrated Chicago DJ Honey Dijon, sent her books about vogueing and the film Paris Is Burning, chosen to ensure the superstar got the tone right.

If Dijon’s own 2022 album, Black Girl Magic, felt like a companion piece to Renaissance, its successor subtly shifts the focus on to vocal performances, so key to house tracks. While most of this tracklisting is dancefloor-facing, a range of different singers (such as Gabriels’ Jacob Lusk, or Cor.Ece, who also featured on Renaissance), bring a host of approaches, expanding Dijon’s emotional remit.

Sometimes she goes hard and cold – as on Slight Werk, which spotlights the British rapper Bree Runway. Just as sassy are tracks such as International, or Welcome to the Moon. But the night is long and deep; there’s ample time for side quests, like the sultry I Like It Hot, tinged with as much jazz as jungle, led by UK roots singer Greentea Peng. Even better is Smoke and Mirrors, a crisp bossa-soul cut in which Madison McFerrin’s elegant opening gambit – “Do you remember who you were before you were told who you should be?” – is unexpectedly powerful. Kitty Empire

Jessie Ware

Superbloom

(EMI)

Jessie Ware launched her new album, Superbloom, in a London sauna this week, and its steamy vibe is set up by the funny, charged Sauna: “If you wanna last longer… Take it to the sauna.” Superbloom reveals a fully realised disco Ware, elevating her signature luxurious voice with technically impressive production. Here, she layers girl-band voices, groove, synth, even a gospel choir with her delightfully cheeky lyrics.

The album begins by welcoming us into the “Garden”, a kind of disco-inflected Eden where things are coming into flower and all is growth, fertility goddesses, sunlight and dancing. Sadder songs such as 16 Summers, about her children growing older, remind us that all this joy can’t go on forever.

Still, Ware’s songs are huge fun. “Don’t you know who I am?” she sings, as she sees her husband on the dancefloor with another woman, before exclaiming indignantly: “I’m the love of your life.” She’s diva-inspired, her voice elastic, taking inspiration from Grace Jones, Shirley Bassey and Barbra Streisand. You feel they’ve been summoned here, especially over the pulsing beats of Mr Valentine, to beckon a new disco diva into bloom. Lily Isaacs

Tomora

Come Closer

(Fontana)

You’d expect the first full collaboration by a Chemical Brother with one of their guest vocalists to feature a 90s pop peer such as Noel Gallagher or Tim Burgess. Yet this project from Tom Rowlands and Norwegian pop star Aurora Aksnes makes perfect sense once you hear it. Lead single Ring the Alarm is everything a track by the pair should be – Aurora shrieking fiendish encouragement amid a steel-plated symphony of tough house sounds – even if there may be something a little too obvious about it.

Better is the title track’s eerie electronic thunder, lit by Aurora’s sensational wail. Equally pleasurable are rug-pull moments as during The Thing, when the production suddenly heads off in an unpredictable direction. Solo Aurora songs such as 2024’s Starvation played a similar game, so it isn’t entirely Rowlands’s doing. He reaches deep into his bag of studio tricks for epic I Drink the Light, with its earworm vocal and acid frills.

Rave veterans will love the Chemical-patented, drug-triggering disco chainsaw sounds that adorn the album, while Aurora’s ethereal alt-pop seeps through in its quieter moments too. Damien Morris

Adrian Younge

Younge

(Linear Labs)

Producer and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Younge is something of an elder whisperer when it comes to coaxing jazz legends back into the studio. Through his LA-based Jazz Is Dead label he has spent the past decade recording new music from the likes of vibraphonist Roy Ayers and keys player Lonnie Liston Smith. A crucial aspect of Younge’s process is recording to tape and embellishing improvisations with orchestral arrangements, and on his latest solo record he essentially does away with the featured talent to present nine of these luscious instrumentals unadorned.

Drawing on much-sampled orchestral works by Lalo Schifrin, Ennio Morricone and more, Younge is enigmatic and expansive, like the soundtrack to an imagined movie. Different Directions and Moon Travelling harness a driving drum groove and staccato baritone saxophone lines to create a sense of motion; the downtempo Clockwise produces tension through trilling strings, while Human Absence riffs on reverb-laden guitar for Morricone-style theatrics.

With each track running around the three-minute mark, these are vignettes that call for further extension and complexity, or a soaring lead feature to break the album out of its mood-music consistency. Ammar Kalia

When Lip Critic’s frontman, Bret Kaser, discovered a fan had stolen his identity, convinced that the band’s music contained hidden clues to a scavenger hunt, it could have been a grim footnote in their story. Instead, Kaser put it back into the music. Theft World takes the violation and twists it into something stranger, more intimate. The album is a restless, warped reflection on obsession, paranoia and the parasocial relationships formed between artist and audience in the digital age.

The New York-based four-piece have the chaos of Black Midi and the swagger of Geese, but with a distinctly volatile live reputation. Their breakout came with 2024’s Hex Dealer, a cult favourite that smashed together elements of hardcore, electro-punk and club music to create something deliberately excessive. It cemented their word-of-mouth appeal on a global scale.

Lip Critic’s sound is still mutating. Tracks such as Talon and Legs in a Snare lurch between blown-out beats, barked vocals and glitchy, short-circuiting electronics, like Dimes Square indie fed through a dying club soundsystem. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2024, drummer Danny Eberle described the band’s goal as ”trying to take an approach of extremities”. This doesn’t feel like a provocation any more, it’s a promise. Georgia Evans

Theft World is out on 1 May via Partisan. Lip Critic tour the UK, 29 June-3 July

Photograph by Justin Pietropaoli