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Beyoncé's latest is empowering and exhausting, King Princess delivers pop gold, and Maggie Rogers supplies ravenous, hollering songs
Beyoncé, Renaissance (Colombia Records) ★★★★☆
James Hall’s full review of Renaissance ran in The Telegraph on July 29
… Over 16 tracks, Renaissance is essentially a tribute to two forms of music: late-1980s and early-1990s house, and disco. It is peppered with sounds that anyone watching reruns of Top of the Pops from that era on BBC Four will be instantly familiar with: tinny synths, fat basslines and foreboding voiceover snippets. But the package is infused with hip hop and Beyoncé’s powerhouse vocals, either rapped or sung.
Inevitably, the album boasts the involvement of a list of producers, collaborators and sampled artists as long as your arm – from Grace Jones, Tems and Drake to Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder and Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z. The whole thing is big, shiny and unwieldy, which perhaps explain her comments about imperfection. It is also often brilliant, in the way that going clubbing and having a massive night can be brilliant: it’s energising, thrilling, empowering… and exhausting. James Hall
Read the full review here
King Princess: Hold On Baby (Zelig) ★★★★★
King Princess is the alter ego of Mikaela Straus, a multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter from Brooklyn. Hold On Baby is her second album: a smart, intense, provocative, seductive slice of future pop, justifying the industry hype that has been building around her.
Straus was first offered a record deal at 11 years old, which suggests that her talent was never in doubt. Her father was a recording engineer, and she spent her formative years messing about in his studio, singing backing vocals for bands. She dropped...