Dawn Richard - Redemption

Pitchfork 80

At first blush, Redemption, the new Dawn Richard record, feels like a victory lap. The conclusion to a trilogy of albums, Redemption signifies the end of a project that felt, at one point, as if its completion were uncertain, between shifting collaborators and Richard's brief 2014 reunion with the girl group Danity Kane. Redemption's opening tracks also seem to confirm that it's intended as the inverse to its predecessor, 2015's Blackheart, the sound of which was thick and full of dissonance; Redemption initially feels weightless. As it progresses, though, it reveals a depth that's both distinct from its predecessors and draws on them both.

Richard's 2013 album, Goldenheart, seemed to describe a disintegrating relationship that had ascended into myth; Richard positioned herself as if she were engaged in battle with her own emotions, and through metaphor her emotions had swollen into literal giants. “Faced the beast with my bare hands/Tried to break me down with all his strength,” she sang in “Goliath.” Blackheart was more slippery, a vortex of introspection in which Richard’s grasp of metaphor seemed to deliberately loosen, so that mythical figures like Calypso and the Titans coexisted with the thrum of amphetamines and the slur of depression.

If Goldenheart is aggressive and Blackheart is depressive, Redemption is reflective. This is a curious position from which to record a dance record; the dance floor is rarely characterized as a reflective space. More often it is utopian, escapist, a portal to an alternate reality. In the first proper song, “Love Under Lights,” Richard paints her own dance floor vision. She encounters a woman in a Led Zeppelin shirt, and they start to talk about music. “She said she fucking with Drake/I said King Kendrick,” Richard sings as the synthetic pulses behind her ripple and gleam. “I guess we’re kindred spirits.” Richard conceives of the dance floor as a place of protest (“Black Crimes”), of contemplation (“Voices”), of engagement (“Vines”), all of which are components of desire, whether for another person or another life. The drums behind her shatter and reorganize themselves into new rhythms throughout the album , as if they’re building and disassembling digital chandeliers.

The production on Redemption is distinct from the glassy backdrops her former collaborator and manager Druski provided on Goldenheart, and it's a deliberate move away from Blackheart's production, which felt like being sucked into a whirlpool. Blackheart’s primary producer, Noisecastle III, appears twice on Redemption, on “Black Crimes” and “LA,” but his more collagist aesthetic blends seamlessly with the sound world that Machinedrum and Richard build, an incandescent fusion of the organic and the synthetic, the electronic and the acoustic.

The notes that open “Voices,” while digitally manipulated and multiplied, sound like they've been issued from a bass clarinet. The bass tones that break through the surface of “Renegades” are oddly reminiscent of a tuba. “LA” is a parallel ode to Louisiana, where Richard was born, and Los Angeles, where Richard lives now; it mutates from a stuttered, ultramodern gleam into a spiraling guitar solo that sounds imported from a ’70s jazz fusion album. Then the melody shifts again, this time performed by a polyphonic brass band arranged by Trombone Shorty to resemble a New Orleans second line parade.

The integrity of Richard's voice provides the through line, which is often caught in ghostly tangles of itself or locking into prismatic harmonies, similar to how Prince or D’Angelo treated their voices. On the interludes, which are often as fully formed as the actual songs, Richard isolates and distorts her voice until it seems to separate into kilobytes. “Hey Nikki” is the closest the album comes to settling into an R&B tradition: It's an inversion of Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” considering the character through a different lens; instead of viewing her as an object of desire, it isolates her agency, and the song generates its desire from the aura of that agency. (Blackheart did the same thing with the titular character of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”) Richard’s voice floats above the music in the verses, but doubles, deepens, and fights through a menacing haze in the chorus: “Hey Nikki/Don't you wanna come and get with me?”

After “Hey Nikki” the album descends into a more introspective space. “Sands” describes a past relationship; In “The Louvre” she elevates someone into “a work of art” as a way of letting them go, and then the record itself lets go of its own instrumentation as it segues the outro, “Valhalla.” Richard, her voice heavily processed, finally glimpses her utopia; it is one “where rebels are the majority/And my color isn't a minority.” The tone is one of arrival after a long struggle, but there are hints, too, that this maybe a fantasy: “Escape,” she sings, and it feels as if her promised land was a mirage, forever shimmering just out of reach.