DAWN - new breed

The Guardian 80

(Local Action)
The New Orleans musician draws influences from that city, pop, funk, sci-fi and Afro-surrealism, yet sounds effortless

‘Nothing can stop me,” sings Dawn Richard on the title track of New Breed, “I do what I wanna.” Of course, pop stars are always saying things like that, but Richard is more headstrong and unique than most.

The path from TV talent show pop star to edgy leftfield auteur is largely untrodden – or at least it was until Richard started gamely tramping down it. She first came to prominence in the US as a member of Danity Kane, a girl group manufactured to Sean Combs’s specifications on the MTV series Making the Band. After their brief career ended in the obligatory acrimonious split (an attempted reunion in 2013 was drawn to a swift conclusion by a fight), and following an equally brief period in Combs’s ho-hum collective Diddy-Dirty Money, Richard took off on a solo career no one could have predicted. She made three critically hosannaed, interlinked concept albums. Lyrical imagery drawn from science-fiction and medieval warfare crashed into futuristic production and songs that frequently dispensed with standard verse-chorus-verse structures in favour of a stream-of-consciousness approach.

Pitchfork 70

Moving in a more traditional R&B direction, new breed is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality.