Usher Raymond IV’s album sales may be down since his many-times platinum run of the late Nineties and early 2000s, but as an entertainer, the 45-year-old remains in high demand. Fresh off the back of a string of residency concerts in Las Vegas and then Paris, and a prime time television role on the US version of The Voice, on Sunday he will be the latest star to perform the Super Bowl halftime show.
It’s the pop music equivalent of, well, the Super Bowl, a planet-stopping 13 minutes that has previously been a huge cultural moment for everyone from Madonna to Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen to The Rolling Stones. Prince and Michael Jackson did it too – two men with whom Usher has cultivated strong connections. He sang a tribute to Prince at the Grammy Awards in 2020. Like Jackson, he was performing since childhood, and recognised early as both an extraordinary singer and dancer. In 2009 he sang Gone Too Soon, tearing up at the casket, at Jackson’s memorial service.
If anything, his first solo album in eight years serves as an advert for the Super Bowl gig rather than the other way around. He has spent his recent career reminding people that he is responsible for a large quantity of hits – Yeah!, U Remind Me and Burn are among his American number ones – is there anything here to match it?
With a hefty 20 songs, Coming Home gives fans plenty of options. There’s tortured, trad R&B with On the Side, where he mourns the fact that he’s carrying on with someone else’s girl, and a sweltering slow jam on I am the Party. There are conscious rips of classic pop, too, as on A-Town Girl, which relocates Billy Joel’s Uptown Girl to Usher’s Atlanta home, and BIG, with its rolling bassline and triumphant horns echoing Jackson’s Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’.
He also manages to modernise subtly, brushing up against the Afrobeats sound on the title track and Ruin, which feature the Nigerian stars Pheelz and Burna Boy, and getting together with BTS boy band man Jung Kook for the disco update, Standing Next to You.
His voice remains buttery smooth, and anyone who just wants to dim the lights and grind against the furniture will find much to go on, though all the smoochy ones do start to melt into one another on such a lengthy collection. But there’s plenty here to prove that he deserves his place in the biggest spotlight of all this Sunday.
