The best era of pop music is the one you grew up with—a truism that feels like reality if, like Erika de Casier and this writer, music TV was your oxygen in the year 2000. Recently the conveyor belt of retromania returned to glittery, silver aesthetic of Aaliyah, TLC and Jennifer Lopez, but the Y2K revival finds its most meticulous partner in de Casier, whose third album is a faithful reminder of a very specific moment in black American music—a time when pop dominance and The electronic vanguard were two sides of the same coin.
On her previous albums, the Copenhagen singer and producer combed through '90s and '00s UK garage and flashes of IDM, as well as the intensity of creepy future R&B breakaway led by Timbaland, Missy Elliott and Aaliyah . The style of the millennium 2021 Impressive elevated de Casier to a critical darling, but her biggest commercial success came via a collaboration with K-pop outfit NewJeans, translating Jersey club bounce into two stratospheric singles, “Super Shy” and “Cool With You.”
On Yet—the title refers to both J.Lo and Dr. Dre—de Casier narrows her focus, sticking mostly to a palette of sweet, recognizable vocals in the lineage of Janet, Mýa and Ashanti. plucked strings and stuttering rhythms à la Darkchild and Timbaland. and an air of restraint that feels deliberately adult, as described by Sade and Maxwell. The Proustian madeleine tastes good. The slippery, sultry “ooh” is a testament to Aaliyah and Tim's greatest hits, a whacky boudoir that takes a turn from Ice Cube and Ms. Toi's crazy anthem “You Can Do It.” There are fourth-wall-breaking ad-libs straight out of the postmodern '90s—some of them in Danish—like “Stop!” which stops the “Ice”. On this track, which underpins the album's impeccably catchy middle third, de Casier brings in Tampa rap duo They Hate Change for a sweet-and-sour duet, the way they used to do it – there's accusations, someone 'on freeze mode' and Copenhagen gives boys “frozen feet”.
Aaliyah's rise in the mid-'90s called time on the bigwigs of the previous generation and introduced an intimate, heady style that remains the blueprint for countless young singers, including current stylists Billie Eilish and Olivia. Rodrigo. De Casier pushes this technique to exciting extremes, with her vocals so far back in the mix that it's almost backwards. Her performance in “The Princess,” a feminist calculating desire (“Is it wrong from me to want all the things has been shown all my life?”), is like sandpaper meets velvet, showing her absolute control in a minute, ASMR -like a scale.
