Nearly every song could've been a single, and it's no surprise that about half of them already were. Lipa herself sounds much more confident on the album vocally her distinct lower register lends itself well to many of the album's groovier cuts, like the sparse "Pretty Please," or the synth-driven, summery "Cool." From top to bottom, Future Nostalgia is packed with memorable hooks, irresistible rhythms, and unflinching swagger. While the album's influences are often clear, Future Nostalgia rarely relies on them too heavily, and instead strives towards a comfortable middle ground between the new and familiar. The album often takes cues from dance music giants of past and present, with the pounding bass of "Hallucinate" recalling early Daft Punk, while the funky, swaggering refrain of "Levitating" resembling choruses Chic or Donna Summer would've created during their prime. Following the success of her self-titled album three years prior (which spawned the omnipresent hit "New Rules"), Future Nostalgia is a complete sonic shift from often-generic pop towards tasteful homages to both '70s disco/funk and early 2000s synthpop, while not sounding out of place within the 2020 radio pop landscape. The song's lyrics, in which Lipa aims to blur the lines between the classic and modern, serve as a thesis for the record itself.
"You want a timeless song, I wanna change the game," begins the title track to Dua Lipa's sophomore LP, Future Nostalgia.
Protoje trades lines with dancehall auto-tunester Popcaan on the equally hard-to-pin-down "Like Royalty," he fuses reggae with soul/R&B on "Same So" and the Lila Iké-featuring "In Bloom," he half-raps on songs like "Deliverance" and the Wiz Khalifa-featuring "A Vibe," and he goes full psychedelia on the trippy ode to marijuana, "Weed & Ting." He sounds like a natural throughout the whole album, and as he expertly blurs the lines between genre, he never forgets the importance of a good hook. It's the best song on In Search Of Lost Time, but the hits don't stop coming. It's sorta reggae, sorta dancehall, but mostly it sounds like something totally new. It's a hypnotic, infectious, endlessly replayable song, and I don't know (or care) what genre you would call it. If you want proof that new and exciting things are happening within reggae right now, look no further than this album's opening track "Switch It Up," which sees Protoje teaming up with the genre's brightest new star, Koffee. A lot of his peers are on their first or second full-length album he's on his fifth, and it sounds just as fresh and inspired as anything he's done in the past. Protoje is one of the original leaders of the reggae revival, and he remains one of the most prolific. Moses is far from the only person bridging this gap - recent years have seen Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Flying Lotus, Thundercat, and others achieve similar feats - but with Dark Matter, he established himself alongside all of those artists as one of today's greats. Contributing instrumentalists such as Sons of Kemet’s Theon Cross, Erza Collective’s Joe Armon-Jones, and Nubya Garcia shine throughout the album as much as Moses does with his frenetic rhythms, reminding you that electronic production can go hand in hand with live-band jazz instrumentation. Standout moments come when UK soul singer Poppy Ajudha and Afropop singers Obongjayar and Nonku Phiri take the mic, and many of the instrumental songs hit just as hard. Its futuristic production has more in common with what's currently happening within hip hop and electronic music than with what jazz sounded like half a century ago, and these aren't songs that you need to be a music scholar to appreciate these are songs you can get up and dance to (as was once commonly the case for jazz). If you still need proof that innovative, modern-sounding jazz comes out today, look no further than drummer/composer Moses Boyd's sophomore solo album Dark Matter. Jazz gets (wrongly) criticized as a style of music that's become something academic, something where the goal is to learn and mirror the traditions of the past.