Natalie Prass - The Future and the Past

The Quietus

“My whole life I’ve been compared to Karen Carpenter, pretty much on looks alone,” Natalie Prass said at a recent London gig. Towards the end of this album, she takes that comparison and turns it on its head. “Tell me why do birds / Do they suddenly disappear / Instead of singing here,” she sings, aiming directly at The Carpenters’ biggest hit. “Oh, what are we to do? / We can't believe it's true / We're so far from you.” Words originally intended for an ex-lover become a way of playing with this role she’s been assigned; it feels like a kind of manifesto.

Breakups have been an inspiration for Prass since the beginning, and this album was no different, but this time there’s the extra heartache of seeing Donald Trump elected president of her home country. “I was devastated," she’s said. “It made me question what it means to be a woman in America, whether any of the things I thought were getting better were actually improving, who I am and what I believe in.” Even reading the news turns into a heartbreaking activity, as she sings on opener ‘Oh My’, with slapped bass, sharp synths and filtered backing vocals creating an alluring funk base for the singer’s soft, forlorn voice.

But if she’s down, she’s not out: “Ain’t nobody can take this from our hands,” she sings on the closing track. “Ain’t nobody here is givin' it up.” Prass has embraced a new sound full of funk and groove, inspired by the last decades of the 20th century, from R&B to dance music, from ‘Short Court Style’ to ‘The Fire’ to the standout here, ‘Sisters’. Prass’ delicate vocals over a jazzy grand piano, pave the way for a gospel choir in the chorus. Her talent for writing great ballads à la Dusty Springfield is still evident, too, on ‘Lost’ and, of course, ‘Far From You’ - completing the sonic palette of a magnificent pop album.

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The Guardian 80

(ATO) The singer from the Spacebomb collective scrapped two albums on the way to this brilliant final version, where old styles – soul, R&B, tropicalia – never feel retro

Of the steady trickle of albums to have emerged from Virginia’s Spacebomb Studios in recent years, the best might well be Natalie Prass’s eponymous 2015 debut. It seemed like the perfect collision of artist and place. As much a mad folly as a recording facility, Spacebomb is a studio dedicated to making records in the way they were made in the 1960s and 70s, complete with a house band: in Prass, they found a local songwriter whose tough nine-year apprenticeship in Nashville had left her with an impressive ability to craft songs that weren’t so much retro as timeless. Filled with glancing references to old southern soul, show tunes and classic Brill Building songwriting, you could imagine the songs on her debut tumbling out of a radio at pretty much any point in the last 50 years; its opening tracks My Baby Don’t Understand Me and Bird of Prey imbued with that weird, covetable quality of instant familiarity, sounding on first listen less like a new song than old classic you’d known for years, somehow forgotten about and were charmed to be reminded of.

Related: Natalie Prass review – fighting oppression with a charm offensive

Pitchfork 77

The singer-songwriter follows up her gloriously baroque debut with an album that uses deep grooves, politicized self-portraiture, and an eye for everyday cruelty to reckon with life in the Trump era.