Solange - When I Get Home [2019]

After her commercial breakthrough with the fantastic A Seat At The Table, Solange is back with another great record. Like its predecessor, When I Get Home has a strong focus on the mellow instead of the bombastic, however, this time around the structure is quite different. Although A Seat At The Table was a strong project lyrically and musically, it was an album defined by the power of Solange's words, which were at the forefront of its conversation. Conversely, on When I Get Home, the lyrics are much less pointed and there is a significantly less amount of them. While there are moments like the wittily rapped "Binz" that offer instantly quotable soundbites ("dollars never show up on CP time"), this record finds its power in the fruitful marriage between the impressive instrumentation and the mantras of Solange's lovely voice. When I Get Home features Solange's compositional style diving even further into the funk-and-jazz-tinged Neo-Soul rabbit hole that previous tracks like "Weary" and "Junie" hinted at. 

Solange - A Seat At The Table [2016]

In recent years D'Angelo's Black Messiah and Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp A Butterfly, albums that undeniably pull from the rich past of black music, genres like funk, soul and jazz, but at the same time feel fresh and contain socio-political commentary ("The Charade", "Alright"), have been released to wide mainstream and critical success. Each album performed extremely well on the charts, with D'Angelo and Kendrick Lamar reaching number five and number one on the billboard charts respectively. If these albums are continuing any relatively recent musical lineage, it is that of the Soulquarians, an eclectic collective of instrumentalists, singers and rappers of which D'Angelo himself was apart of. The Soulquarians, which consisted of Erykah Badu, Bilal, Common, D'Angelo, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, Roy Hargrove, Q-Tip, Questlove, J Dilla and Raphael Saadiq, created a number of beautiful albums during the late 90s and early 2000s, that were full of soul (be it the expression or the actual genre), jazzy, funky and at times contained socio-political - pro-black - commentary (e.g: Common - Like Water For Chocolate). 2014 gave us Black Messiah, 2015 To Pimp A Butterfly and 2016's gift is Solange's A Seat at the Table, the latest, Soulquarian-descendent to take the charts by storm.