Cry Baby
Vince Staples
(Loma Vista)
Sharing an era with Donald Glover and Kendrick Lamar must be galling for the Californian rapper and actor Vince Staples. His output – six engrossing studio albums to date, Netflix’s The Vince Staples Show – would surely be better known had Glover not made hit song This Is America and Atlanta for TV, and had Lamar not won an ugly beef with Drake and earned a Pulitzer.
Cry Baby, Staples’s seventh album, is another success that largely abandons hip-hop production for a louche live band roll – like the Roots, but dripping with fury. White America’s violent racism is Staples’s target, as high-calibre videos for the album’s two singles – Blackberry Marmalade, which quotes Martin Luther King and is filmed in the style of a first-person shooting game; and White Flag, with its stars and stripes white-washing – reinforce his unflinching messages.
If Staples occasionally veers into weary tropes – TV Guide suggests the television might be controlling us – he always has a sideways take; here, playing on the word “box” (TVs, caskets, assumptions). This is still a hip-hop album, but Staples is explicitly re-claiming rock as a Black medium through which he can stare down internal demons while begging external persecutors not to shoot. Kitty Empire
Bitch
Lizzo
(Atlantic)
Bitch
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Lizzo
(Atlantic)
Lizzo’s latest album arrives three years after misconduct allegations derailed her soaring, singular career. A legal battle is still ongoing surrounding claims of sexual, racial and religious harassment brought by former backing dancers, which she denies. Bitch, her first studio album since 2022, is formed of the same defiance that helped cement her rise, but here it’s less convincing. Bitch’s cover art shows her superimposed as a raised middle finger; the string-laden overture of the opener A Toast spells the message out further: “So here’s a toast to wasted time … I’m letting go just to free my mind.”
Empowerment was once Lizzo’s greatest currency, but it’s hard not to hear these tracks as crude copies of what used to be magic. Bitch’s title track reduces a sample of Meredith Brooks’s classic feminist anthem to low-stakes sass. She Stole My Man and Whose Hair Is This take similar aim at a romantic rivalry. The Prince-esque That Grrrl is a highlight, while the synth-laden power ballad Don’t Make Me Love U also takes us back to the 80s. Lizzo wants us to get over the drama, but by the turbo-caffeinated pep of the closing track, you sense that she is only trying to convince herself. Lisa Wright
Neon Summer Skin
Bedouine
(Thirty Tigers)
Neon Summer Skin
Bedouine
(Thirty Tigers)
Azniv Korkejian’s latest album came about after her final visit to her parents in Saudi Arabia before they retired home to Armenia. The musician, known for her poignant folk melodies sung over finger-picked guitar, was born in Aleppo, Syria, spent her childhood in Riyadh and her teenage years in Houston, Texas, before settling in LA. This nomadic life – reflected in her stage name Bedouine – continues to be a source of inspiration on her fourth record, as she sings in her velvety voice of family and upbringing.
Long Way to Fall brings with it an intriguing Weyes Blood-like nostalgia with lovely keyboards and strings, but never goes anywhere, and ends up feeling tepid. One Thing Right has a pleasing airy flute tune and soft drums, but cliched lyrics let it down: “Be careful what you wish for / As the saying goes / I don’t really know about / The things that I’ve been told.” There is more of interest on Canopies, a longing ballad sung over strummed guitar whose intro features a recording of Korkejian’s mother, and on Na Na Na, a shuffling bossa nova that finishes with a quirky keyboard riff. But for all the compelling stories behind the making of Neon Summer Skin, the sonic result is underwhelming. Ellen Peirson-Hagger
Massa
Fatoumata Diawara
(Nø Førmat)
Over the 14 years since Fatoumata Diawara arrived aboard Damon Albarn’s Africa Express, the Malian singer has become the queen of Afrofuturist pop, her songs rooted in the Wassoulou traditions of her homeland but fused with modernist techniques. Plus, as she is proud to point out, Diawara is Mali’s first female solo electric guitarist, these days toting a signature-edition instrument from Epiphone.
A serial collaborator, notably with Albarn’s Gorillaz and the Cuban pianist Roberto Fonseca, Diawara appears for this fourth studio album alongside Matthieu Chedid – a French singer, rock guitarist and producer known as M – which is an association that may widen her audience but proves disappointing. Amid a familiar clatter of drums on the lead cut, Djanne, one half expects David Bowie to pop up and call “Let’s Dance”.
Diawara fares better on lighter numbers such as the jangling Sigui, on which she calls out jealousy and hypocrisy, and Fala (“orphan”). While she represents emancipation, Diawara’s concerns are often deeply personal, involving family, polygamy and the scourge of FGM. Her vocals are unwaveringly tender or jubilant, but musically Massa lacks peaks and valleys, a sense of new frontiers being blazed. Neil Spencer
One to watch: Flowerovlove
For those looking to find a PG alternative to Sabrina Carpenter, with all the hooks but none of the fellatio references, Flowerovlove – the alter ego of 21-year-old Joyce Cissé – might just fit the bill. Cissé has a fresh-faced yet high-fashion aesthetic that’s already landed her a Gucci campaign and runway appearance at Paris fashion week, and her music treads a similar slick but sweet line.
Hers are playful, effervescent pop nuggets concerning situationships (New Friends) and head-over-heels romances (American Wedding). Even when she adopts a sassier tone on I’m Your First (“You can’t believe that I exist / I know I’m your first bad bitch”), it’s with the wide-eyed quality of youth and new experience.
Cissé grew up in south London, but Flowerovlove’s music feels better suited to LA and she is clearly setting her sights on success beyond British turf. In April she made her Coachella debut, bringing out Filipino girl group Bini for the crush-filled sugar rush of Breaking News. Later this year she’ll join the former One Direction star Niall Horan on his arena tour. Recent tracks boast writing credits from Justin Tranter and Skyler Stonestreet – established hitmakers who’ve written for stars from Chappell Roan to Ariana Grande. With a debut LP slated for release this year, Cissé is primed to try and join them in pop’s big league. Lisa Wright
American Wedding video is out now. Flowerovlove supports Niall Horan on tour in UK and Europe, 22 September – 16 November
Photographs by Adrian Nieto, Ebi Sampson, Janell Shirtcliff, Marcello Perego, David López Osuna