The renewed critical interest in soul and R&B music that sprung up around the rise of Miguel, Frank Ocean, and the like over the last four years has helped award some much-deserved prestige on the form after years of undue neglect, but the push broke as much as it fixed. The music commands more respect now, but the accolades are disproportionately showered on a boy’s club of talented, offbeat songwriters circuitously linked together under the banner of "alternative R&B" by little else than the fact they all had very good albums out the same year. "Alt-R&B" isn’t just circuitous, though; it’s not real. Cordoning off and lionizing an alternative quadrant of R&B dismisses gifted but traditional singers like K. Michelle as plebeian, and worse, it carries the subtle insinuation that this music can’t be—and hasn’t always been—delightfully weird.
California soul collective the Internet frequently weather the alternative R&B tag, but hopefully their new album Ego Death will help shake the descriptor. It made sense around the group’s 2011 debut Purple Naked Ladies, a quiet collaboration between Odd Future affiliates Syd tha Kyd and Jet Age of Tomorrow architect Matt Martians. On Purple, Syd stepped out of her role as Odd Future’s house engineer into that of singer-songwriter for a batch of quirky, sometimes-crass tunes about the peaks and pitfalls of love and sex. Since then, Syd and Matt have expanded the project into a fully functional band. While the arrangements grew more accomplished between Purple and 2013’s Feel Good, the songwriting lagged, sultry and intimate, if, at times, not much else. Syd comes into her own as a writer on Ego Death, and the band steps up and reins Feel Good’s jazz-chords-for-jazz-chords’-sake extravagance into tight, hooky hip-hop soul.
Ego Death is both spare and quietly musical, its crisp low end anchored in hip-hop as the rest of the band coolly branches out into jazz, funk, and rock. Think of it as an offspring of early neo-soul pillars like Groove Theory and Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, bedroomy but also lush and progressive. Ego Death is leagues too studiously retro to fit anyone’s idea of "alternative," but it’s still plenty odd. These songs frequently take hard, unexpected turns: Opener "Get Away" is a tribal bass and percussion stomp in the verses (twice as sinister live) but gossamer and pretty around the choruses. "Gabby"’s hip-hop strut melts into a psychedelic waltz-timed coda adorned with pretty, wordless melodies from Janelle Monáe. "Girl", the album’s Kaytranada-assisted centerpiece, hangs spectral keys over thick, heavy bass until the groove trails off into a spacey interlude. Ego Death’s short cuts get straight to the point, while the longer ones tease out instrumental sections without coming apart at the seams.
The economic, purposeful instrumentation clears ample room to showcase Syd’s writing, and she’s got a war story here for every stage of love and loss: "Special Affair" and "Go With It" are horned-up player’s anthems ("Fuck what’s in your phone, I wanna take you home."), while "Get Away" and "Under Control" beg a suspicious lover to stop nagging about girls she’s not cheating with. "Girl" is the big syrupy cohabitation ballad, the song couples will hug and sway through at the live show, but "Partners in Crime Part Three" raises the stakes, testing our duo’s mettle with a Thelma & Louise police chase. Syd taunts an old flame on "Just Sayin/I Tried", chanting "You fucked up," but ultimately coming to peace with the break because she did everything in her power to stop it. Parsing Syd’s lyrics can feel like eavesdropping on a lover’s quarrel in a restaurant; she’s adept at tackling complex matters of the heart in a voice that’s both relatable and conversational. The Internet’s songs have always felt like scenes of salaciousness happening just out of earshot. Ego Death finally pulls us into the maelstrom.
