It’s not the formula for radio songs.”Ĭase in point: the album’s third single, “Song Cry,” an outpouring of anguish that includes thoughts of suicide and crippling levels of loneliness. “When you do that, you have to be willing to be unpopular. “Hope - I wanted to give to that to the people,” he says. Alsina anticipates listeners’ potential cynicism at the end of a song called “Change,” intoning softly, “I’m guilty of daydreaming I can change the world.” As soon as he expresses his lofty ambition, the track dissolves into a recording of laughter - an easy way to dodge his sincerity.īut on the phone, the singer consistently returns to his message of uplift. He covered this ground on his 2014 debut, Testimony, but now it is the dominant concern, especially after the first few tracks, which feel like weak attempts at commercial collaborations with big-name guests (Lil Wayne) but don’t fit with the rest of the album. They sleep on good music.”Īlsina leaves behind the thematic template of his previous hits as well, focusing almost entirely on the struggles of America’s poor black community. “When a record like hits the radio, they don’t know how to react to it. “The radio is so dumbed-down,” Knucklehead laments. But there’s a cost to denying current trends: None of the singles have replicated the path of Alsina’s previous hits. In sound and theme, this is far from the work of competitors like Jeremih or Chris Brown, and This Thing Called Life largely follows in the footsteps of “Hip Hop,” ignoring the trap-derived or dancefloor-aiming production that rules contemporary R&B and incorporating more guitars than is common. The world needs records like that to feed on.” “ spilled his heart on that record - the Mike Brown situation, the police stuff that was going on. “When I first made, I had August or Nas in mind,” Knucklehead remembers. Large portions of the song feature the singer loping along with only a rifle-shot breakbeat, and the track is strangely bass-less until the hook. The first sign of this was “Hip-Hop,” which appeared in April and evoked Nineties boom bap cooked down to its ragged essence. My goal was to go as far to the left of ‘I Luv This Shit’ as possible.” “But I just felt like the world needed food that sticks to their ribs. “The turn-up music could have been done so easily,” Knucklehead affirms confidently in a separate conversation. Seven songs on the record are produced by Knucklehead (Samuel Irving), the man behind “I Luv This Shit,” but the beat-maker suggests that he had little interest in reprising that formula. This Thing Called Life is distinguished by a marked turn away from the sound of that single - and of radio R&B more generally.

August alsina new songs