It’s her from Diddy-Dirty Money with a brand new solo career…
[Video][Website]
[7.20]
Brad Shoup: Discordant, icy. Since Diddy’s been involved with her career from the jump, I assume this is a secondhand narrative. It’s a hard one to parse. Rather cannily, Richard anthropomorphizes the industry as a woman; whether it was her intent or not, her listeners’ imaginations are gonna go nuts. Great timbres, particularly from the percussion: shuffling, scratching, burbling. Please give me a video so I can parse it for Illuminati imagery.
[8]
Iain Mew: “She ice skated on my heart/Couldn’t feel the blade” comes as a serious wow moment when backed up by a song that does feel like it’s created from sharp shards of ice and cold stainless steel. What emotional blows the skittering beats and pinpoint synths can’t deliver, Dawn makes sure to finish off with her vocal performance of numbed horror.
[9]
Anthony Easton: The spiders over glass shard piano, instrumental sections, are eerie and unnsettling: genuinely beautiful, and quite difficult to live through, the faders and auto tunes on some of the vocals are interesting aesthetic choices. It is robotic in the best sense of that word. That the song ends with the phrase “she wore, she wore, she wore,” and how Dawn Richard sings “she wore” like “she won,” and still how black lipstick is artificial and a little isolating, makeup for fashion as opposed to makeup for sex, mean that this song is a slash of very mild resistance against the sex for sex’s sake R&B stakes. Not that there is anything wrong with sex for sex’s sake, or that the act is truly strange, but I do find myself liking the chances made here.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Chilly, ominous and erotic. The synths glide between an early New Wave twitch and a classic horror movie tingle, as apt a setting as any for the psychodrama being played out, one in which our (apparently) heterosexual narrator finds herself flirting with the unknown and unexpected before suffering a sudden heartbreaking betrayal. That the narrative is so cooly evasive about the details is both frustrating and wholly appropriate; in the end, our heroine is left with little more than a sense memory, and so too are we.
[7]
Andrew Ryce: This reminds me of a subtler version of the trance-pop I used to like when I was a preteen. It never quite picks up, the chorus is awkward and jammed to the gills in an “Official Girl” kinda way — but not as charming — and the production just kinda flails limply. This sounds like someone trying to weld Weeknd-style mope’n’b with araabmuzik-style Euro-drama and ending up with a pool of tepid water.
[3]
Katherine St Asaph: Specter-and-b that’s gripping at first until everything, from the synth pings above to the drum-and-bass loop beneath, starts to sounds familiar. It’s lush but distracting, and it renders the narrative all but pointless.
[7]
Jonathan Bradley: Showily avant garde yet deftly underplayed at the same time; this is finely-executed craft in action. Its untethered though: sure, it’s ethereal and otherworldly, but what for? What precisely about black lipstick and pulmonary muscle skating rinks — yes, that lyric is ridiculous — is so apparently unsettling?
[7]
Jonathan Bogart: I can take or leave chilly and sultry apart; but when they’re together, I’m in heaven.
[9]
Edward Okulicz: “Black Lipstick” is heartbreak exacerbated by an Arctic frost, and that goes for the music and Richard’s performance, which is pure poetry.
[9]
Alfred Soto: Had this appeared on Last Train to Paris it would’ve been a sensation: a dusk-tinged “mood” track with an Everything But The Girl-tinged drums and bass influence. The strings and rattling percussion do all the work though. I don’t know what the title means either.
[6]