Chromatica Review

The design here is smart: interstitial string pieces break the album into three acts so that it plays as a continuous set rather than a tracklist, and the tempo barely drops from start to finish. Rain on Me is the highlight, a euphoric duet about crying that sounds like relief, and 911, built on an unsettling stuttering loop about antipsychotic medication, is the most inventive production of her career.

Alice and Free Woman are proper club records. The problem is the writing. The lyrics gesture at trauma and recovery in short repeated phrases that work as chants and evaporate on the page, and across sixteen tracks the emotional content stays at the same fixed depth. It is also front loaded, with the final third noticeably weaker. Judged as a dance album it is excellent and it does exactly what it was built to do. Judged as a record with something to say it is thinner than the concept promises.