To read the headlines it might seem as though R&B is in crisis. Some say it’s dead. Others say it has lost its identity. Critics hymn so-called “alternative” R&B, a minimising tag that every artist shoved under that umbrella seems to loathe. But Fana Hues is keeping the faith. “For me, R&B is the foundation of pop music today,” the California songwriter has said. “It could never be dead!”
Certainly not with Hues pumping blood through its heart. You may know her woozy vocals from Tyler, the Creator’s Call Me If You Get Lost, where she voiced his unattainable love interest. Her new full-length, Flora + Fana, occupies a more introspective headspace as she treads water after a broken relationship: the opening song, Moscato, about drowning her sorrows, swirls as sweetly as the last drops of wine around a long-stemmed glass.
It’s a silkier, warmer record than her shadowy 2020 debut Hues, occupying a similarly swimmy headspace to KeiyaA’s breakout album Forever, Ya Girl or Solange’s loose-limbed When I Get Home. It also offers an understated distillation of Hues’s deep musical schooling: she was one of nine kids in a family that constantly played and sang together. Flora + Fana spans gorgeous weirdo funk, warped synths that pan like pebbles skittering across a moonlit lake, creeping guitar scales – and her supple, vulnerable voice, another texture billowing alongside them.
It’s gorgeously written, too, navigating the push-pull of heartache in a way that only the purest of R&B can: “Got them spirits in me,” she sings on High Roller. “I’m holy ghosting.”
• Flora + Fana will be released via Bright Antenna Records on 25 March
