By day, Erika de Casier offers out soft-spoken come-ons and kiss-offs by way of throwback R&B. By night time, she’s an incognito hitmaker. Final 12 months de Casier lent a steely edge to Floridian producer Nick Léon’s heady summer time membership reduce “Bikini,” and in 2023 she bought within the studio with Ok-pop group NewJeans, co-writing a number of songs from their Get Up EP—amongst them the winningly naive “Tremendous Shy.” The Danish singer has quietly left her fingerprints throughout pop’s ongoing Y2K revival, however typically at the price of Erika de Casier the solo recording artist. Whereas her final album, 2024’s Nonetheless, may usually stun and delight—the chortle and twinkling chimes that kick off “Fortunate” by no means fail to make me grin—a spate of pointless visitor options diluted its creator’s singular skills. Fully self-written, self-produced, and launched on her personal label, Unbiased Jeep Music, Lifetime is a deliberate recentering, de Casier’s try and single-handedly distill the higher a part of a decade into one extremely potent vibe.
Forgoing her trademark nostalgia for the ’00s, de Casier has dedicated herself to pre-Napsterdom in spirit and sound, triangulating three high-concept pop lodestars all launched between 1992 and 1998: Janet Jackson’s Janet., Madonna’s Ray of Gentle, and, on the apex of her altar, Sade’s Love Deluxe. Each track right here fades in—how retro is that—on a mattress of aqueous synthesizers, buoyed by boom-bap drums. “If , what I’d do, do to you,” de Casier coos on album opener “Miss,” her voice enveloped in a lot reverb that it dissolves on the edges. One working title for Lifetime was Midnight Caller, a simple shorthand for seduction, thriller, and menace rolled into one. A number of tracks (“You Can’t All the time Get What You Need,” “The Chase,” “Two Thieves”) even incorporate what are both diegetic dial tones—a famous Janet-ism—or soundwaves formed to convincingly mimic one.
As “Miss” yields to the hothouse piano and tabla of “You Can’t All the time Get What You Need,” Lifetime takes a flip in direction of Pure Moods, and with that some period-accurate new-age triteness: “Well being or illness—you by no means know what you get/Would possibly as properly dwell gratefully.” However de Casier delivers these songs archly and suggestively—a glimmer in her eye, liquor on her breath—and the lyric sheet is appropriately marked up with every stray “uh,” “uhmm,” “ah,” and “mmh-mhh.” On “Moan,” a religious successor to Jackson’s “Throb,” her hypnotic entreaty to “simply make love” warps the entire monitor round it, as represented by an impassioned keysmash: “%!//&”//“/!!/!(()!=“##=”. The syncopated hook of “Delusional,” constructed round a pattern immortalized by Cypress Hill’s “Insane within the Mind,” is irresistibly ear-catching, as is the way in which de Casier’s tongue catches on “gradual mo-tion,” proper earlier than “You Acquired It!” kicks up a sprig of seafoam. And every now and then, de Casier will hit on one thing profound: “The reality was within the backside of the wine/Bordeaux could make you speak rather a lot,” she notes, soberly, on the trip-hop standout “December.”
