![]() ![]() ![]() Radio 1's Huw Stephens sensibly dispensed with pigeonholes premiering catchy new single In/Out last week, simply hailing Croll 'a melodic musical genius', and Xfm and Radio 2 seem to agree. File next to: Jhene Aiko, Cassie, Solange, the Internet.That the genre-bending Liverpudlian crooner and LIPA alumnus Dan Croll has been variously and accurately described as afrobeat, 'indie J-pop synth 'n' b' or 'folk-cum-electro-pop' should give some indication of just how genre-bending he really is. ![]() The truth: She's one possible future for female R&B. Once Upon a High closes an EP of superb quality and distinction and introduces an artist with a vision singular enough to demand everyone's attention, not just those waiting for R&B to ascend to the next level. It's like hearing a glimpse of the Björk- Beyoncé collaboration that will never be, a new kind of avant-jazz pop: unorthodox and untrammelled, yet accessible enough for repeat plays. Time Travel Undone is the one, though, the surest sign of the uncharted places SZA intends to go. Crack Dreams obviates the necessity for the titular narcotic with its tranquilising bleepscape. Euphraxia finds SZA waxing esoteric about existentialism and the like, searching for answers over a clipped clatter – it's like some future hip-hop made by a band on 4AD in 1985. Bed is like Ciara if she met a producer up to the task of creating the right context for her sugar hiccup. Country is breathtakingly pretty, blues and soul from Venus and Mars. Here, though, it's one-part gospel to two-parts celestial warble. You can hear how, in lesser hands, the voice would have made that line an unsubtle rallying cry, belted or bellowed out. On Ice.Moon, SZA sings: "Show me a way to a higher place". The production – by, variously, Felix Snow and Patrick Lukens, BrandUn DeShay, ApSuperProducer and Top Notch, any one of whom could, for all we know, become the next Darkchild – goes beyond hippie trippiness to bring a sense of radiant splendour and rapt stupefaction. ![]() Her lyrics are inscrutable, adding to the atmosphere of pleasant torpor/stupor, but those titles (especially Advil, Crack Dreams and Once Upon a High, obviously) hint at a desire to retreat or escape from the worldly and everyday. Lately, she's been listening to a lot of Animal Collective and Ella Fitzgerald. She calls herself SZA (pronounced letter by letter), and not surprisingly loves RZA from the Wu-Tang Clan, as well as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Björk. Solana Rowe was born in St.Louis but has lived her whole life in New Jersey. It's like some outrageous culmination of all our favourite recent initiatives: witch house, chillwave, cloud rap, ethereal R&B: Cassie sings the Cocteau Twins with Syd tha Kid at the controls for the TriAngle label, or something. Amid it all is a voice that's just another gorgeous, gaseous spectre in the mist/mix. The production on tracks such as Euphraxia, Advil, Crack Dreams, Once Upon a High, and Time Travel Undone (compare those titles with, say, the ones on the latest Rihanna album, with their rote language and love tropes) is INSANE, a mindblowing murk of billowing synths, bombing bass and crushed beats. Imagine Aaliyah in the afterlife, or Solange in space – this music sounds as though it's coming at you from the other side, or the outer limits. Her EP,, which came out in the States last year and gets a release here next month, is the next logical step for indie or alt R&B – and we use those appellations because we haven't heard a sound this far out on an equivalent major label release since the glory days of Aaliyah and Timbaland. The background: We're not saying we're excited about SZA or anything, but we do think the music she is making does as much to advance the cause of the female R&B musician as Drake, the Weeknd, Miguel and Frank Ocean did for the male variety. ![]()
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