On the outset of Tune-Yards’ vibrant new album Higher Dreaming, Merrill Garbus asks in a hushed voice, “Prepared?” It’s the sound of a performer steeling herself, a personal inhale earlier than unleashing “Heartbreak,” a full-bodied groove stuffed with pleasure and ache in equal measure. “Watch me survive one other heartbreak,” Garbus intones sweetly, earlier than belting her method via a rousing refrain and a center eight of sheer vocal power. It’s an apt introduction to a file that charts the tense relationship between vulnerability and energy.
Higher Dreaming is the sixth studio album from Garbus, who first debuted as a solo artist with the lo-fi tape BiRd-BrAiNs and now collaborates as a duo together with her associate, multi-instrumentalist and producer Nate Brenner. Armed with a ukulele, head-spinning percussion, and a liberally used loop pedal, Garbus constructed a status for visceral, biting different pop music constructed on the rhythms of Afro-pop and funk. Tune-Yards’ most up-to-date data, 2018’s I Can Really feel You Creep Into My Personal Life and 2021’s sketchy., each reckoned immediately with Garbus’s place as a white girl working in African musical traditions, and with whiteness extra typically. Although formidable, the songs lacked among the hurricane dynamism of the sooner music, feeling as an alternative restrained and cautious, and typically weighed down by worry and guilt. On the breezier Higher Dreaming, Garbus continues to look at our political panorama—and her personal place in it—together with her standard unflinching lyrical model, however this time it’s been metabolized into one thing extra outward-facing and hopeful: songs you’ll be able to actually dance to.
Garbus has beforehand spoken in regards to the significance of singing, vocalizing, and buzzing as “a pathway via the toughest elements of our psyches.” Higher Dreaming seems like her fullest expression of that concept; her voice sounds extra full-bodied than ever as she urges you to “sing your self into existence” on the cacophonous finale of album nearer “Sanctuary.” Tune-Yards’ instrumentation has famously been dense with concepts, loops, and samples, however right here it’s extra typically pulled taut, to permit Garbus’s voice to hurry like water to fill each crack. On the title observe, her languishing cries are layered collectively in a digital ocean that washes over the listener. Later, on “See You There,” what begins as a plaintive people track erupts right into a scream that crackles with distortion and rage.
It’s Tune-Yards’ most accessible and melodic album thus far. “Limelight,” the funk-driven lead single, was impressed by Garbus and Brenner dancing to George Clinton with their toddler—who additionally options on backing vocals—and it’s no shock to be taught that it was conceived with family-friendly dance events in thoughts. The music might lack among the experimental chew that characterised early Tune-Yards releases like w h o okay i l l, however it’s nonetheless coloured by Garbus’s political intent: “Let go of the life you’re dwelling,” the sun-bright refrain urges: “Let your self see how free you may be.”
