R.& B. has always constituted a large part of pop music. But, more than a decade ago, when Beyoncé was a member of Destiny’s Child, R. & B. was a genre like many others, healthy but not dominant. ’NSync, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera could borrow its phrasing and dance moves but just as easily leave them behind. Now it is the lingua franca of pop, spawning a variety of subgenres and approaches. A new hit album by the British singer Sam Smith, “In the Lonely Hour,” aims for the rafters, making it of a piece with a style of music whose boundaries have been defined by Adele and Beyoncé. These two alpha performers are radically different from each other, and from Smith, but they all believe in the big gesture, the primacy of vocal athletics, and the power of power. Smith, who is twenty-two, is an inoffensive singer who has mastered the moves of his elders without adding any idiosyncrasies. “In the Lonely Hour,” his début album, is currently No. 2 on the Billboard album charts. It represents a savvy compromise among the sincerity of Adele, the coherence of Beyoncé, and the commercial appeal of electronic dance music. However, since Smith is a traditionalist at heart, the frame for his voice is of little concern; the tourists will come because they think he’s hip, but the faithful will come because they know he’s not. Strings, electronic beats, live bands—no matter. Smith is here to reassure you, and he’s done a good job of it. When Adele and Beyoncé release new albums, dominance will be less easy. For now, though, platinum is his, in the absence of genius.
Beyoncé is an expressionist, like Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston, and like other singers rooted in the church. A more low-key set of musicians, such as FKA Twigs and Kelela, has taken cues not from these stars but from another pop leader—Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash in 2001, at the age of twenty-two, after recording three studio albums. For these artists, Beyoncé’s mastery of melismatic runs and roof-raising hollers may be a touchstone—Kelela explicitly cites Beyoncé as an inspiration—but they are more formally indebted to Aaliyah. Hers was an R. & B. that didn’t shine but rather defrosted, showing its center last instead of first. Aaliyah rarely broke a sweat, aesthetically, and, often with the producer Timbaland, created a body of work that has been building to a canonical status. One of her last hits, “Rock the Boat,” takes a fairly obvious sexual metaphor and creates a state of extended ecstasy that never offers full catharsis. Her voice, which is multitracked, is soft, as if her eyes were closed in the recording booth, looking inward while letting her voice out. The beat is of the era, with steady kick drums, but it feels gentle, and the producer throws in conga slaps, guitar figures, and synth blasts that don’t always recur. This is an R. & B. that’s related to the spiritual slow burn of Al Green, but it’s more obscure. It’s abstracted from the church but charged with a secular power, no matter how icy and distant it is.
FKA Twigs was reared in Gloucestershire and is twenty-six years old. Kelela, who is thirty-one, is a second-generation Ethiopian immigrant who was born in Maryland and moved to Los Angeles in 2010. Both singers find transcendence in the higher register, with occasional forays into full falsetto. Their music doesn’t seek elaboration or explosion, and their backing tracks avoid articulated drumbeats, leaning on hi-hats and varieties of thump. A listener could dance, if so inspired, but it doesn’t feel required. The music projects an intimacy that’s distant from the stadium, and even from the exposure of radio: these artists are bringing R. & B. into the dark, where someone is more likely to hear a song on his or her own, rather than in a room with others.
FKA Twigs divides her energy evenly between visuals and music. As a performer, she is an extrovert, making videos that use images from Egyptian mythology, and wearing elaborate outfits. She has mastered a graphic language that matches her movement—a neglected skill in recent generations of pop stars. She is also fluid and self-contained as a dancer.
In contrast, her first two releases—which bear the utilitarian names “EP” and “EP2”—were calibrated for close quarters. “Papi Pacify,” from “EP2” (2013), has already been covered by the English singer and guitarist Anna Calvi. This would not be remarkable except that the song barely registers—it’s a twist of voice and noises that rarely sticks to a time signature. The straightforward words play against the music: “Clarify, pacify our love. Oh, show—tell me I’m the only one, like I didn’t know.” Twigs’s voice sounds as if it never rises above a whisper, even when it does. The producer, Arca, drops in various sounds that seem at odds with the gentle pleading of the voice—there are wobbling chords, enormous clanks, and wandering hi-hats, but never a fully committed downbeat. This is a style that both acknowledges R. & B. and rejects it, comfortable with allegiance without agreeing to compromise.
Twigs’s début full-length album, “LP1,” which will be released in August, makes no systemic changes. Working with a variety of producers—including Clams Casino, who has made well-known tracks for A$AP Rocky, among others—Twigs hides her feelings in plain sight. On “Lights On,” she sneaks in what sounds like a manifesto: “When I trust you we can do it with the lights on.” It’s another song decorated with sirens and clashing sounds and rumbles but nothing resolving into a steady beat. On “Two Weeks,” the album’s first single, she extends the theme of song as prelude, not payoff: “You say you want me, I say you’ll live without it. Unless you’re the only one who instigates, got your mouth, open your heart.” It’s an intriguing and fertile template: she places all the romantic and sexual action offstage, thereby returning to a premodern era of nondisclosure in pop lyrics. Yet it feels entirely postmodern. The sounds on the album span such a wide range that it’s hard to know what to call any of it. Some passages sound like string quartets played backward, some like eggs dropped from a great height. The main effect is of non-resolution. FKA Twigs dresses like a high-fashion model from antiquity, but her songs promise the very contemporary pleasures of texture and emotional immediacy.
While Kelela is still at work on her first full-length album, her music has already landed closer to the mainstream than Twigs’s. She’s no more given to a big gesture than Twigs is, but her singing is slightly more direct, and she has no problem letting her collaborators—producers like Kingdom and Bok Bok—lay a solid beat behind her. However, in this context, solid is still a fair distance from the metrics of mainstream pop. Her single “Want It,” performed with the rapper Tink and produced by DJ Dahi, released on SoundCloud earlier this year, isn’t nearly as unearthly as the work of Twigs. DJ Dahi provides rhythms that move in a single time signature, while a synth bass line and chords repeat with a traditional regularity, though percussive elements drop in and out. Kelela uses overlapping lines, singing, “Your body is telling me yes,” and then echoing the phrase; both lines eventually converge, to sing, “You want it.” In a different era, Kelela might have chased the kind of record deal that Aaliyah had. But she’s thrown her lot in with Kingdom’s Fade to Mind label, and the fans who thirty years ago might have flocked to Sade or Gwen Guthrie will find Kelela now. With artists like these, R. & B. has found a way to nurture its own underground, even while Beyoncé is still ascendant. Call it estate planning. ♦
